GMO Building Blockshttp://fafdl.org/gmobb
Building better understanding of biotech crops, one block at a timeFri, 29 Jun 2018 12:40:50 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.874108641Substantial Equivalence, Explainedhttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/substantial-equivalence-explained/
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 18:21:28 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=765If there is one concept that drives much of divide in the GMO debate, it’s substantial equivalence. Having different understandings or misunderstandings of the concept leads to rancor, distrust and talking past each other.]]>

If there is one concept that drives much of divide in the GMO debate, it’s substantial equivalence. Having different understandings or misunderstandings of the concept leads to rancor, distrust and talking past each other. Proponents see it as a common sense way of determining if heightened regulatory scrutiny for a new product is warranted or unnecessary. Critics of genetic engineering often see it as some sort of trick — a sleight of hand or legalistic loophole. They ask how something can be so novel that on one hand, it merits the legal protection of a patent monopoly, and then on the other hand, the FDA can declare it to be substantially equivalent to its parent variety or breed. That suspicious and often paranoid take is nearly always based on misunderstandings of the concept of substantial equivalence and how patents work.

As long as we’re all getting on the same page …

Let’s clear up another major misconception. That is: What is the scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs? Many who are distrustful of genetic engineering or are outright anti-GMO misunderstand what the consensus is, and thus find it patently wrong on its face. And they’d be right, if the consensus was what they think it is.

More often than not, critics of the technology portray the scientific consensus as: GMOs are safe. Indeed, they can be forgiven (at least those who aren’t old pros) because proponents of the technology too often portray it in the same way.

But that isn’t just a misconception, it’s a category error. The scientific consensus is not about GMOs. It’s about genetic engineering. It’s about the process, not the products. And it’s not about “safety” it’s about relative risk.

The scientific consensus on genetic engineering is: Genetic engineering is not substantially more risky than more traditional breeding methods, and that all breeding methods carry some small risks of harmful unintended consequences. Indeed, many scientists see the relative precision of moving one or two genes to improve a plant or animal as less likely to introduce unintended consequences than traditional breeding methods. In fact, many breeding projects using traditional methods are seeking transformations that are as ambitious, if not more so, than genetically engineered traits on the market. Either way, it’s nearly unanimous among scientists in the relevant fields, that all common breeding techniques present very low risk of harmful unintended consequences, especially changes that might escape detection prior to commercialization. No breeding method is considered safe, only that the relative risk is very small. Science doesn’t deal in “safe”, only in relative risk, though the somewhat awkward language of low relative risk can get translated into “safe” for a lay readership.

With the greater regulatory scrutiny that biotech products get, a reasonable case can be made that they come with less risks for consumers, though in either case the risks are miniscule.

But there is an understanding that, just as traditional breeding methods have unintentionally raised the levels of natural toxins in crops in the past, biotech breeding could introduce or trigger new toxins or allergens. In the 1960s, celery breeders developed a variety of celery that produced higher levels of psoralens, a natural insecticide. The celery had to be pulled off the market when it turned out to give farm workers rashes due to phytophotodermatitis. Also in the 1960’s hoping for a better potato chip, breeders produced a potato the produced more of the neurotoxin solanine so that it wasn’t just toxic to insects, but produced a dose level that made humans sick. Thus there is no scientific consensus that traditional breeding methods are safe or that all products of traditional breeding are safe, only that the breeding methods are low risk, and products we regularly use are generally recognized as safe.

The GMOInside characterization of the FDA’s position in the meme above on substantial equivalence and GMOs isn’t quite correct. The FDA did not rule that all GMOs are by definition substantially equivalent and thus do not merit special labels. The rule is that new crops that are found to be substantially equivalent do not merit special labels. But the law remains that if a new crop were found to be safe for human consumption, but NOT substantially equivalent, then a label might be warranted. If Golden Rice were ever to commercialized in the US, it could very well require a label because beta-carotene is a nutrient not normally found in rice. There are lots of potential modifications that we could imagine that are safe and useful but change the composition of the plant or animal enough to put it outside of normal variation.

How is substantial equivalency used by regulators?

It should be noted that, though substantial equivalence is associated with biotech regulation, it’s a regulatory concept used by food safety agencies for analyzing a broad range of new products.

Food safety regulators in the FDA and around the world use substantial equivalency to assess how much scrutiny a new food product needs before being commercialized. If a new food is judged to be substantially equivalent to foods that are considered safe either through previous testing or, more often, through a long history of use, then they do not need to require animal feeding studies or other long and expensive demonstrations of safety (technically: a minimal level of relative risk). If a novel food product is judged to be substantially equivalent to its parent or within its breed or variety, then it can assumed to be as safe as the parent. If not, it is evaluated as a new food additive and faces further food safety scrutiny.

What does it mean to be substantially equivalent?

A judgement of substantial equivalency starts with a compositional analysis of relevant comparators. I’m going to lay out one simple example and try to get some broad conceptual points across, for a more nuts and bolts look at how compositional analysis is carried out in the context of a substantial equivalence assessment, I recommend Anastasia Bodnar’s brief essay on the matter, written by someone who has does compositional analysis. It details tools and techniques, as well as the limitations and challenges of getting a sound analysis. Please, read the whole thing, but I will quote a bit.

If there is a change that doesn’t fall within the natural variation for that species, especially if there isn’t an obvious scientific explanation for the change, then more testing needs to be done to determine safety with regard to environment and human health.

What substantial equivalence does not do is give license to make assumptions. The process of genetic engineering does have the potential to cause unintended changes in the resulting organism. That’s why a comparative assessment needs to be conducted before a plant, animal or microbe that has been genetically engineered can be deemed substantially equivalent to a non-genetically engineered but genetically similar organism.

So, if we wanted to assess a new fungus-resistant wheat, we would do compositional analysis of a wide range of samples of the parent variety, and perhaps more within the full range of commercial varieties. We’d map the range of protein and starch content, the range of metabolites and micro-nutrients produced, etc. Then we’d have a baseline of ranges for the component parts of wheat to assess substantial equivalence.

If we were looking at protein content, soft wheat usually ranges from 8-11 percent protein and hard red winter is usually between 10-13 percent. At first glance, that seems like a fairly narrow range, but higher protein wheat has 30 percent more protein than low protein wheat. And that can be within exact same variety, genetically identical, but grown under different conditions. So if a new biotech variety of winter wheat that produced either more or less protein than its parent, but still landed within the 10-13 percent range it would be substantially equivalent regarding protein content. In some cases we might zoom out to the full range of protein content of commercial wheat to assess equivalency. Within the full range, from 8-13 percent, the higher protein wheat has a full 60 percent more protein than low protein wheat. That would give a very wide range in terms of what is considered normal protein content in wheat.

Then you repeat that assessment for all the relevant properties – i.e. look into the ranges for vitamin and mineral content through the whole range of properties that this kind of compositional analysis covers. You do this until you get a full sense of whether this new wheat is wheat within the range of properties that we expect within our current supply of commercial wheat.

A 2013 paper by Herman and Price looked at 20 years of research relating to compositional changes in biotech products and found no evidence of unintended consequences in the literature. The body of research comparing the potential for unintended consequences from biotech and selective breeding due to insertional effects, copy number variation (CNV), presence/absence variation (PAV), and transcriptomic effects can be found here.

Can you pick the real tomato out of a line up?

Let’s run through some simple examples so that we lay persons can fully internalize the wide range of properties we take for granted, but then get elided when someone balks at the concept of substantial equivalence with regards to novel crops.

Tomatoes are a great example of the wide, wide, wide range of properties, of compositional variation in what we consider a tomato.

Cherry tomato mix – Wikicommons

All those greens, reds, yellows, oranges, and purples represent very different levels of various nutrients, and who knows what else? (somebody knows, probably Harry Klee and Kevin Folta at the University of Florida know but you get the point)

Scroll through and browse the tomato offerings at Johnny’s Seeds, an organic seed company that caters to gardeners and growers for the local and farm to table market. You’ll find tomatoes of all shapes and sizes bred for very distinct properties:

There are two points here. The first is to hammer home just how much range in properties and composition there can be when we assess what it means for a new variety or newly traited crop to be substantially equivalent within its species. The range of sugars and proteins and flavoids and carotenoids and blight resistance and metabolites and polyphenols and gene expression among what we all recognize as tomatoes is enormous. You’d have to change the nutritional profile of a tomato quite a bit to nudge it outside of normal observable ranges. Likewise, it is possible for an organic breeder trying to increase nematode resistance to unintentionally increase the production of potentially toxic protein outside of normal ranges. It’s unlikely but not impossible, or even unheard of. The FDA would not consider that tomato to be substantially equivalent, even though bred by traditional means.

Other things to consider are the useful and idiosyncratic traits presented here that we understand as safe. If the proteins expressed in fusarium wilt resistant tomatoes are generally considered safe in tomatoes, if we were to transfer them via biotech methods to basil or bananas, is there reason to believe we introduced any more risk than in using traditional methods to another variety of tomato? The FDA would consider that as a food additive. They would then want a compositional analysis showing that the introduction of the gene for wilt resistance hadn’t resulted in other genetic changes that put the basil outside of the range of substantial equivalence.

Likewise the toxins produced by nematode resistant tomatoes to protect against nematodes might be useful in a cucumber. If the gene or genes for nematode resistance are transferred to a cucumber plant, if the compound that’s toxic to nematodes is expressed in a similar range to what’s seen in the donor tomato, that’s going to be considered as a change carrying a very low risk of unintended consequences.

On the other hand, when the genes to produce Cry proteins for insect resistance were first introduced to potatoes (never commercialized) and then corn, those were coming from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a commonly used organic insecticide. While there was no reason to believe Cry proteins wouldn’t be digested by humans as any other protein, there was no history of safe use to draw on, so beyond compositional analysis, extensive animal feeding trials were required to establish safety. Any potential environmental impacts were assessed separately by the EPA under the rules for pesticide use.

What about patents?

Let’s go back to that provocative question, “How can something be substantially equivalent and yet novel enough to warrant a patent?”.

I hope at this point, the question has mostly been answered. A novel, useful characteristic or set of characteristics brought about by the labor of a breeder (or breeding program) can fall well within the normal compositional range of … let’s stick with tomatoes, and still be distinct enough to warrant the protection of patent monopoly so that the breeder’s work can be protected and paid for.

Massive early yields, deep red color, and unusually rich flavor. Developed in collaboration with Dr. Majid Foolad of Penn State University, Valentine marries the best of wild-type tomato genetics with flavorful high-performing strains. This vivid red, high-yielding, and early blight resistant tomato is the first commercial variety developed with Penn State’s patented high-lycopene breeding lines. Excellent color contrast when mixed with Nova or Golden Sweet. … U.S. Patent #8,524,992. Intermediate resistance to alternaria (early) blight.

We can look up U.S. Patent #8,524,992 and see what the breeders claim in unique and useful in their invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The present invention discloses new and distinct inbred tomato lines and hybrids of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) with higher than average lycopene content. The invention discloses publically available genetic markers which are linked to various QTLs which are associated with increased lycopene content in plants.

The present invention also discloses methods of making and using such inbred lines and hybrids. In one embodiment, the present invention discloses a new and distinct inbred tomato line, designated PSU high lycopene cherry tomato, PSCH-2; PSU high lycopene grape tomato, PSGR-23; and PSU high lycopene plum tomato, PSPL-1.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to a distinct tomato line with dual ripening stages, which is designated the Goose Creek tomato line. Additionally, the invention relates in part to seed and fruit of the Goose Creek tomato line as well as methods of producing the plant, fruit, and seed of the Goose Creek tomato line and Goose Creek-derived tomato plants, fruit, and seed.

So, there really is no tension between patenting plants which are also found by the FDA to be substantially equivalent.

Generally, when were are talking about objections to biotech crops and intellectual property protections, we aren’t really talking about patents, but the technology agreements that farmers sign in order to use the seeds they purchase, the way you agree to a EULA when you purchase software. But that’s a story for another day.

Read more:
• GMOs: An Introduction
• About Those Industry Funded GMO Studies . . .
• Answering the 3 Most Common Internet Objections to GMOs[Please consider supporting GMO Building Blocks with an ongoing contribution of $1, $2, $3, $5 or $10 a month on Patreon. Or make a one time donation via PayPal. ]
]]>765GMOs and Herbicide Use: It’s Complicatedhttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/gmos-and-herbicide-use-its-complicated/
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 16:43:24 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=736There is strong evidence that herbicide use has indeed increased in GMO crops (corn, soybean, and cotton), much as the critics have suggested. However, the evidence also suggest that herbicide use has increased even faster in the non-GMO crops rice and wheat. This suggests that there is an overall trend for increasing herbicide use in all crops, irrespective of whether GMO varieties are available. It is even plausible, based on these data, that GMO crops have slowed the increase in herbicide use (though it is impossible to say for sure).]]>

Herbicide use patterns in the US have changed a lot over the last 25 years. Depending on who you talk to, those changes are either proof that modern American agriculture will feed the world with fewer inputs, or proof that the US agricultural system is irreparably broken. There seems to be no middle ground in this discussion.

Herbicide use is especially controversial when discussed in the context of genetically engineered crops (often called GMOs, for genetically modified organisms). The most widely adopted GMO trait worldwide allows crops to be sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate (most commonly known as Monsanto’s Roundup, but now sold under a variety of names by several different companies). Critics of GMOs often blame these glyphosate-resistant crops for increasing the use of herbicides; while proponents of GMOs say these varieties have allowed the use of less toxic herbicides. To date, however, there hasn’t been very strong evidence to support either of those assertions.

There have been a few studies in the recent literature that have attempted to describe the changes in herbicide use in relation to GMO crops. But with few exceptions, those studies have relied on weak methods of measurement. In particular, they have reported the total weight of herbicide being applied, or “pounds on the ground” as some like to say. But simply adding up the weight of herbicide applied misses the point.

Herbicides vary widely in their toxicity, both to plants and other organisms including humans. So combining them all together and reporting a single number of pounds applied isn’t very meaningful. It would be akin to a doctor prescribing the same dose of medicine, regardless of the potency of the drug. It would be ridiculous to prescribe the same amount of Tylenol and morphine just because they’re both pain killers. A 500 mg dose of these two drugs would lead to very different outcomes. The same is true with herbicides. One pound of imazethapyr would have a dramatically different impact compared to one pound of acetochlor.

There are many potential aspects of herbicides that are of interest; impacts on human health, impacts on wildlife such as bees and fish, impacts on soil health, etc. A few previous authors have compared herbicides using an index called the environmental impact quotient (EIQ) that incorporates a lot of established toxicity data. However, multiple authors over the last 20 years have found the EIQ has very little relation to actual risks associated with herbicides. Because of the way the EIQ is constructed, it is nearly meaningless for predicting actual risks to health or the environment.

I have a new paper out today, published in the journal Nature Communications, titled “Long-term trends in the intensity and relative toxicity of herbicide use.” In this paper, I investigated changes in the mammalian toxicity of herbicides over time, since mammalian toxicity is among the best estimates we have for the risks faced by pesticide applicators. Risks to consumers would theoretically follow similar trends, but since pesticide applicators are exposed to much greater doses (and exposed far more often) the results of this analysis will be most applicable to that group. The overall goal of this analysis was to evaluate how mammalian toxicity of herbicides in the US has changed over the last 25 years, especially in the wake of widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops (often called GMOs).

Part of my motivation for undertaking this project was simply to look at the evidence in an attempt to answer the question: “Did adoption of GMO varieties have a positive or negative effect on herbicide use?” Admittedly, the publicly available data I used weren’t suited to answering this question exactly; but the overall trends, I think, still provide sound evidence on which to base some conclusions.

First of all, I found strong evidence that herbicide use has indeed increased in GMO crops (corn, soybean, and cotton), much as the critics have suggested. However, I also found that herbicide use has increased even faster in the non-GMO crops rice and wheat. This suggests that there is an overall trend for increasing herbicide use in all crops, irrespective of whether GMO varieties are available. It is even plausible, based on these data, that GMO crops have slowed the increase in herbicide use (though it is impossible to say for sure).

Another interesting finding from this analysis is that the trends in relative herbicide toxicity are different depending on whether you look at acute or chronic toxicity. Acute toxicity is what most people think of when they hear the word “toxic.” Acute toxicity describes how much of a chemical would be required to cause problems in a one-time exposure. Think spilling onto your clothes, or accidentally drinking the herbicide. But for pesticide applicators, the chronic toxicity of a herbicide is arguably more relevant, since they’re interacting with these chemicals on a regular basis for many years of their lives. It is rare for an applicator to accidentally ingest an acutely toxic dose; but much lower doses are required to cause chronic effects, as long as the exposure is repeated enough times. As a pesticide applicator myself, I was particularly interested in the chronic toxicity hazard results.

Of the three GMO crops in the analysis, the chronic toxicity hazard associated with herbicides has actually increased in corn and cotton, but decreased in soybean over the last 25 years. But in all three crops, few of the changes in herbicide use that caused chronic toxicity to change are directly attributable to the GMO traits. In the final year of corn herbicide use data (2014), just two herbicides (atrazine and mesotrione) made up 88% of the total chronic toxicity hazard. In cotton, just one herbicide (diuron) made up 88% of the total chronic toxicity hazard. Use of these herbicides aren’t tied to adoption of GMO crops; these herbicides were used before GMOs, and have continued to be used after GMO adoption.

Even though glyphosate use has increased greatly over the last 25 years, my analysis suggests the relative contribution of glyphosate to the chronic toxicity hazard has remained relatively low. Glyphosate has a very low chronic toxicity compared to most other herbicides. In corn and cotton, the chronic toxicity hazard increased over the last 25 years, but glyphosate contributed less than 4% to the chronic toxicity hazard in the final year of the data set. Similar results were observed in soybean, where glyphosate accounted for 43% of all herbicide treatments in 2015, but glyphosate made up less than 1% of the chronic toxicity hazard.

Another interesting finding in this paper is that most of the major reductions in toxicity hazard were unrelated to the adoption of GMO crops. Where toxicity was reduced, it was mostly due to EPA removing the most toxic herbicides from commercial use. In particular, registration cancellations for cyanazine, alachlor, and molinate had major impacts on the toxicity hazard quotients in the analysis (see the supplementary information file for details).

I’ve written before that if we stopped using glyphosate, some other weed control tool would necessarily take its place. And those other tools would have risks (and benefits). Agricultural decisions have real-world implications. This analysis also suggests that if glyphosate were no longer used in these GMO crops, there would likely be a substantial increase in the chronic toxicity hazard associated with herbicide use, since it would almost certainly be replaced with more toxic herbicides. Unfortunately it is very difficult to say how great that impact would be. In my opinion, we need to figure out ways to become less reliant on herbicides for weed control; the overall increase in herbicide intensity in all crops in this analysis is concerning. It is possible that continued reliance on GMO crops and herbicides has even slowed development of other potential solutions (like robotics, cultural practices like crop rotations, etc.).

In summary, this analysis suggests that GMOs have had a positive effect (or at the very least neutral or non-negative effect) with respect to herbicide use intensity and mammalian toxicity, and I’m sure that will disappoint many folks who don’t like GMOs. But it also shows the benefit of GMOs in reducing herbicide intensity and toxicity doesn’t appear quite as dramatic as many GMO proponents would like to believe.

]]>736Does Genetically Engineered Cotton Lead to Farmer Suicide in India?http://fafdl.org/gmobb/does-genetically-engineered-cotton-lead-to-farmer-suicide-in-india/
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 15:55:34 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=779The balance of evidence favours the argument that adopting Bt cotton has increased yields in all cotton-growing states except Punjab, and has reduced pesticide costs so that the crop has become more profitable for farmers. So it’s reasonable to suppose that these farmers have reduced their debts and, to the extent that suicide has an economic component, are less at risk of committing suicide.]]>

This piece originally appeared on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license.

Arguments surrounding the use of genetically modified crops and whether they are the solution to the world’s problems of food supply and public health are no nearer to resolution than when GE was introduced.

In Europe, there is widespread opposition to GE crops, with import or cultivation of many GE foods prohibited by EU regulations. In the Americas, and to a lesser extent in Asia, regulations are less stringent and a substantial proportion of the area used to grow corn, soybean and cotton is planted with GE seeds.

The agri-business companies responsible for developing the seeds, notably Monsanto, are frequent targets of anti-GE campaigners. But not all GE crops come from the private sector, with considerable research underway at public research institutions or funded by charities – not that this provides protection from protesters, such as when Golden Rice field trials were destroyed in the Philippines last year.

GE seeds are not just used for foodstuffs. Most of the cotton grown in India comes from GE seeds, referred to as Bt cotton having had the addition of genes from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, which provides resistance to cotton bollworm. Even so, India has banned the use of GE food crops, notably aubergine, partly from the belief that the rate of suicide among farmers has increased in cotton-growing states since Bt cotton was introduced in 2002.

This belief was espoused by Prince Charles in 2008 and more recently by the controversial environmental campaigner Vandana Shiva. Anti-GMO campaigns point to the costs of seeds and the fact that a crop failure can ruin farmers who then turn to suicide.

A look at the numbers

The suggestion that there is a suicide among Indian farmers every half an hour seems shocking. This is not a very helpful statistic however; there are more than 40m Indian farmers in the nine main cotton-growing states.

Fortunately, suicide is rare, and no less rare among Indian farmers than among farmers in other parts of the world. In 2011, the annual suicide rate for Indian farmers in the main cotton-growing states was around 30 per 100,000 farmers. This is higher than in England and Wales where the rate is about 12 per 100,000, but similar to the best estimates of the rates in Scotland and France.

The evidence indicates that GE farming does not lead to higher suicide rates. In six out of the nine cotton-growing states, the suicide rate for males who did not work on farms was higher than for farmers. Also in 2001 (before Bt cotton was introduced) the suicide rate was 31.7 per 100,000 and in 2011 the corresponding estimate was 29.3 – only a minor difference.

The balance of evidence favours the argument that adopting Bt cotton has increased yields in all cotton-growing states except Punjab, and has reduced pesticide costs so that the crop has become more profitable for farmers. So it’s reasonable to suppose that these farmers have reduced their debts and, to the extent that suicide has an economic component, are less at risk of committing suicide.

In fact, the available data does not support the view that farmer suicides have increased following the introduction of Bt cotton. Taking all states together, there is evidence to support the hypothesis that the reverse is true: male farmer suicide rates have actually declined after 2005 having been increasing before then.

The picture at the state level is less clear-cut, especially the contrast between Maharashtra and Punjab. In Maharashtra, farmer suicides have gone down, in Punjab they have gone up. Can we bring any more evidence to bear to understand this contrast better?

Unsupported trends

Both Punjab and Maharashtra have relatively high proportions of farmers growing cotton (26% and 20%) and Bt adoption rates are much the same. However, when we examine the effect of the introduction of Bt cotton on cotton yields, we find that yields have risen in Maharashtra but have gone down in Punjab. We cannot, of course, say that this is a causal effect but the results for these two states are in line with the hypothesis that there is an economic component to the explanation of suicides.

The Indian farmer suicide story has become received wisdom for some anti-GMO campaigners. In fact, we find that the suicide rate for male Indian farmers is slightly lower than the non-farmer rate. And Indian suicide rates as a whole are not notably high in a global context. The pattern of changes in suicide rates over the last 15 years is consistent with a beneficial effect of Bt cotton, albeit not in every cotton-growing state.

The widespread adoption of Bt cotton – more than 90% by area in most states – means we will never have the opportunity to carry out a before and after epidemiological study of cotton farmers. Instead we have to rely on official data at an aggregate level with all the caveats that entails. However, such a study might be possible if permission to grow GE vegetable crops is granted by the Indian government (as it has been in Bangladesh) and might lead to a more definitive answer.

]]>779The Ethics of the Séralini Retraction and Charges of Conflict of Interesthttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/the-ethics-of-the-seralini-retraction-and-charges-of-conflict-of-interest/
http://fafdl.org/gmobb/the-ethics-of-the-seralini-retraction-and-charges-of-conflict-of-interest/#commentsThu, 18 May 2017 03:46:16 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=725Debating the ethics of the Séralini retraction gives us opportunities to elucidates just what it means to 'ask questions' and critically think about industry influence and conflicts of interest.]]>

These two pieces first appeared on the now defunct blog REALFOOD.ORG in 2014 amid the controversy surrounding the infamous Séralini rat study and it’s subsequent retraction. The study has largely been conceded by the anti-GMO community as discredited science, but it still comes up, so I thought this piece will remain relevant indefinitely in documenting the issues that were in dispute. More importantly the piece lays out some arguments about scientific ethics and critical thinking that I remain proud of to this day and hope that others will find value in them going forward. – MB

According to SpinWatch, a European muckraking organization, 11 of the authors of letters to the editor slamming Séralini’s study had undisclosed financial relationships with Monsanto. In 2013, Paul Christou, the editor of Transgenic Research, coauthored an attack on Séralini and the FCT editors in his own journal, calling for a retraction of the study. Christou did not disclose his multiple conflicts of interest, including being an inventor on patents on GM crop technology, many of which Monsanto owns. Meanwhile, back at Food and Chemical Toxicology, a new position for an associate editor was filled by Richard E. Goodman, a University of Nebraska professor who previously worked for Monsanto, and who has a longstanding association with the industry-funded International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). Months later, Elsevier, FCT’s publisher, announced the retraction.

The quality of Séralini’s work aside, the process by which his paper was retracted reeks of industry pressure. The progression of science is not the least bit linear, but the process has to proceed unencumbered by censorship of unpopular or commercially disadvantageous results. The peer review process is imperfect – there are countless bad studies in the medical literature – but peer review works best when the efforts of reviewers and editors are devoid of conflicts of interest and outside pressures. The self-correcting nature of science can only work when industry does not taint the process.

. . . It would have been perfectly appropriate for the journal to have written an editorial expressing its concerns. Instead, it seems the editors may have succumbed to industry pressure to do the wrong thing. The media coverage in the U.S. has been one-sided; criticism of Séralini’s study has been widely covered in mainstream press, while information about the conflicts of interest of critics have remained in the alternative press.

The article raises a number of issues worth addressing.

First, Fugh-Berman and Sherman fail to put the retraction in the context of Séralini’s own ethical lapses. There were lapses in both the execution of the study and in his handling of the publicity following publication.

Letting those tumors grow to the sizes they did was a major ethical lapse. In the context of the issues raised by the article though, what’s more germane is Séralini’s decision to embargo the release of the study. This was clearly done to foil critical coverage of a clearly weak study. Timing the release the study in tandem with his book tour was also highly questionable behavior for a scientist.

The evidence that the study presented was inconclusive and yet Séralini made confident conclusions. That was highly problematic. It’s one thing to publish inconclusive results. It’s another thing to portray the evidence as demonstrating something that it does not. Even more problematic is that he went around the world trumpeting his conclusions. “Data” from inconclusive studies shouldn’t end up plastered on picket signs. In the face of the avalanche of criticism and debunking his research received, the ethical thing for Séralini to have done would have been to withdraw the paper rather than promote it. The paper made have slipped through the initial peer review, but it was absolutely eviscerated in post publication peer review. That much is undeniable.

Regarding the insinuations the journal bowed to industry pressure. The incentives don’t really seem to point in that direction. For the industry, the retraction is a formality. The paper had already been universally discredited. It could only reflect poorly on the industry and stir up paranoia in those rallying to Séralini’s cause. How could the industry not anticipate just these sorts of articles, making just these sorts of insinuations?

The party that has the most to gain is the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. When publishing papers, the authors and the journals enter into a reciprocal relationship. The journals and the authors confer credibility and prestige upon each other. In this case, Séralini took the credibility and prestige that the FCT conferred upon him. He returned the favor by bringing down heaps of scorn and recrimination upon the journal. It’s hard not to imagine that the quantity and quality of submissions suffered. It’s hard not to imagine that the journal felt it needed to do something to rectify the situation.

I agree with critics that the retraction was political. I disagree that it was meant to harm Séralini’s reputation. He had managed that quite well all by himself. The politics behind the retraction almost certainly had to do with salvaging the journal’s reputation. Absent Séralini withdrawing the paper, it’s hard to blame them.

“The quality of Séralini’s work aside, the process by which his paper was retracted reeks of industry pressure.”

This is absolutely wrong. Questions about the motivation of Séralini’s critics are only valid if their criticisms are invalid.

This is what is infuriating about Fugh-Berman and Sherman’s piece. They state that the quality of the Séralini’s work is beside the point. This is wrong. They seem to think that the Séralini Affair is a he said/she said affair; as if it were impossible for bystanders to assess whose position is stronger. It isn’t. Anyone with an 8th grade science education can understand the issues with the paper. Unless they are trying not to. The insinuation that the motivations of those who slammed the study could be explained by conflicts of interest is beside the point. It is beside the point because Séralini’s work was clearly substandard.

It’s valid to be aware of conflicts of interest. It is a reason for heightened scrutiny. However, those potential conflicts only become salient when presented with questions which can’t be explained otherwise. We ask first order questions. Is the evidence and analysis consistent with basic principles of how we understand the world? Is the analysis solid? Do results seem consistent with common experience?

” When you start hollering ‘Conflict of Interest’ before evaluating the evidence and analysis, it becomes a ‘Get of Jail Free Card’. It becomes an excuse for discounting inconvenient evidence. Asking about conflicts of interest should be safeguard against getting snookered. Instead, it becomes a way to justify motivated reasoning. “

If those first order questions haven’t raised any flags, there is no point in asking a second order question about conflicts of interest. If the criticisms of the Séralini paper were unsound, then you should ask, What is driving this? There are cases that call for following the money. This wasn’t one of them. You don’t need to follow the money to understand criticism of poor quality science.

When you start hollering ‘Conflict of Interest’ before evaluating the evidence and analysis, it becomes a ‘Get of Jail Free Card’. It becomes an excuse for discounting inconvenient evidence. Asking about conflicts of interest should be safeguard against getting snookered. Instead, it becomes a way to justify motivated reasoning. Awareness of conflict of interest should be a tool for explaining weak evidence and poor analysis. Instead it becomes an excuse for dismissing strong evidence and sound analysis. It leaves you lost in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by industry funded research, revolving door regulators, and defending bad research that confirms your biases. It leaves you lost in a fever swamp of paranoia without firm footing.

Examining the soundness of the evidence and the strength of the analysis must come first. Then you can decide whether questions of funding and loyalties are relevant. This is how you maintain a firm footing and hew to solid ground. This is how you can use awareness of conflicts of interest to avoid motivated reasoning. Otherwise you are only fueling the fire of your own biases. Fugh-Berman and Sherman level charges of conflict of interest while dismissing the questions about the quality of Séralini’s work. This is upside down and backwards. They should know better.

Sherman and Fugh-Berman Respond

The issue at hand was the retraction of the notorious Séralini rat study.

Sherman and Fugh-Berman held that the retraction was the result of industry pressure and that the retraction didn’t cite reasons that fell within accepted guidelines for retraction [pdf]. I quote them at length to avoid misrepresenting them.

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics, a group that advises medical editors and publishers on ethical issues, particularly, how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct:

Journal editors should consider retracting a publication if:

they have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error)

the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)

it constitutes plagiarism

it reports unethical research

There are hundreds of studies that should be permanently removed from the scientific literature, but the Séralini study is not one of them. The FCT retraction announcement very clearly states: “Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data” – and then goes on to say, incredibly, that the study is being withdrawn because the journal’s own review of the primary data show that the results are inconclusive.

Inconclusive? Until a hypothesis is proven, all results are inconclusive.

It would have been perfectly appropriate for the journal to have written an editorial expressing its concerns. Instead, it seems the editors may have succumbed to industry pressure to do the wrong thing.

. . . The retraction of the Séralini study is a black mark on medical publishing, a blow to science, and a win for corporate bullies.

My response was three fold. I agreed that the retraction had a political element, but that it did not seem to be in response to industry pressure.

Second, Sherman and Fugh-Berman had ignored Séralini’s own ethical lapses. The two that I pointed out were his unusual and manipulative press embargo on the study and his decision to allow the rats to die from massive tumors rather than euthanize them. I did not bring up the conflict of interest that the funding of the study represented. This was a conflict of interest not stated in the paper. Séralini wrote in his book that he funneled industry money through CERES to obscure the funding sources for this study. He failed to disclose any conflicts of interest in the paper. That seems like a major no-no to me.

Third, Sherman and Fugh-Berman had thrown around a lot of innuendo about conflicts of interest. While conflicts of interest raise red flags and call for heightened scrutiny, they do not justify jumping to conclusions. Instead, they should be seen as presenting a hypothesis which should be tested. Sherman and Fugh-Berman say, “The quality of Séralini’s work aside, the process by which his paper was retracted reeks of industry pressure.” But how can you judge whether the retraction can be confidently attributed to industry pressure if you put the quality of Séralini’s work aside?

Before moving on to Sherman and Fugh-Berman’s response, let’s take a quick look at the crux what I wrote:

I agree with critics that the retraction was political. I disagree that it was meant to harm Séralini’s reputation. He had managed that quite well all by himself. The politics behind the retraction almost certainly had to do with salvaging the journal’s reputation. Absent Séralini withdrawing the paper, it’s hard to blame them.

The quality of Séralini’s work aside, the process by which his paper was retracted reeks of industry pressure.

This is absolutely wrong. Questions about the motivation of Séralini’s critics are only valid if their criticisms are invalid.

This is what is infuriating about Fugh-Berman and Sherman’s piece. They state that the quality of the Séralini’s work is beside the point. This is wrong. They seem to think that the Séralini Affair is a he said/she said affair; as if it were impossible for bystanders to assess whose position is stronger. It isn’t. Anyone with an 8th grade science education can understand the issues with the paper. Unless they are trying not to. The insinuation that the motivations of those who slammed the study could be explained by conflicts of interest is beside the point. It is beside the point because Séralini’s work was clearly substandard.

It’s valid to be aware of conflicts of interest. It is a reason for heightened scrutiny. However, those potential conflicts only become salient when presented with questions which can’t be explained otherwise. We ask first order questions. Is the evidence and analysis consistent with basic principles of how we understand the world? Is the analysis solid? Do results seem consistent with common experience?

If those first order questions haven’t raised any flags, there is no point in asking a second order question about conflicts of interest. If the criticisms of the Séralini paper were unsound, then you should ask, What is driving this? There are cases that call for following the money. This wasn’t one of them. You don’t need to follow the money to understand criticism of poor quality science.

When you start hollering ‘Conflict of Interest’ before evaluating the evidence and analysis, it becomes a ‘Get of Jail Free Card’. It becomes an excuse for discounting inconvenient evidence. Asking about conflicts of interest should be safeguard against getting snookered. Instead, it becomes a way to justify motivated reasoning. Awareness of conflict of interest should be a tool for explaining weak evidence and poor analysis. Instead it becomes an excuse for dismissing strong evidence and sound analysis. It leaves you lost in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by industry funded research, revolving door regulators, and defending bad research that confirms your biases. It leaves you lost in a fever swamp of paranoia without firm footing.

Examining the soundness of the evidence and the strength of the analysis must come first. Then you can decide whether questions of funding and loyalties are relevant. This is how you maintain a firm footing and hew to solid ground. This is how you can use awareness of conflicts of interest to avoid motivated reasoning. Otherwise you are only fueling the fire of your own biases. Fugh-Berman and Sherman level charges of conflict of interest while dismissing the questions about the quality of Séralini’s work. This is upside down and backwards.

I think it is clear that I acknowledge that conflicts of interest can be trouble and produce unethical outcomes, but that one must take steps to test whether they are actually affecting events.

Here is Sherman and Fugh-Berman’s response in full (emphasis added):

By all accounts in this case, Gilles-Eric Séralini and colleagues followed the normal route when seeking publication of their study. The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology expressed interest in considering this study for publication, when other journals did not, and the study passed peer review with only minor revisions required. Most importantly, the editors then accepted the findings of their reviewers and published the paper. One can disagree with the reviewers, or one can disagree with the editors, but this is the process we as scientists have accepted.

The scientific peer review process is imperfect and is subject to manipulation. Reviews, especially anonymous reviews, can be colored by conflicts of interest, intellectual biases, personal allegiances, or petty jealousies. As a result, and as we stated in our Bioethics Forum piece, the literature is filled with imperfect, inconclusive and simply bad science. Perhaps the reviewers or editors even recognized the shortcomings of he Séralini study, but decided that elements of the study made important contributions to a GMO literature that is similarly filled with imperfect, inconclusive and simply bad science conducted by industry: who knows? In any case, we deliberately chose not to comment on scientific aspects of the Séralini controversy, focusing instead on critiquing a journal’s unusual retraction of a study that had passed the accepted sequence of peer review and that had not subsequently been shown to be fraudulent, plagiarized, or mistaken.

Mr. Brazeau argues that the conflicts of interests of those in the orchestrated letters to the editor are beside the point because their criticisms are valid. He seems to view conflicts of interest as only a petty annoyance, or as a red herring. In fact, industry-paid researchers will always have more resources and incentives to drown out the voices of non-industry-paid researchers, and that fact interferes with the self-correcting nature of science.

Mr. Brazeau’s claim is a classic “the ends justify the means” argument that is only attractive to those who concur with the result. A strong, well-subscribed publication standard, such as that of the Committee on Publication Ethics, provides justification not only for actions that some approve of, but for what is right and just. Ethical standards provide the bulwark that helps protect science from fraud, error, and commercial interests. In this case, the editors’ actions violated the international standard for the peer review and publication process.

Thomas G. Sherman, PhD
Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD

Before moving on to the meat of our disagreement, I have to flag this statement:

In fact, industry-paid researchers will always have more resources and incentives to drown out the voices of non-industry-paid researchers, and that fact interferes with the self-correcting nature of science.

If you’ve ever done an internet search for information on anything relating to GMOs, then you know that this is a ridiculous assertion.
It is not the voices of industry that are doing the drowning out. If industry was actively drowning out hostile voices, they would have paid somebody to debunk Earth Open Source’s “GMO Myth’s and Truths” by now.

As far as our disagreement goes, let me start by stating as clearly as I can what I believe about the retraction.

1. The retraction was justified by a number of Séralini’s actions. Those included his failure to disclose funding conflicts of interest, his decision not to euthanize tumor riddled rats, the clear and confident conclusion that were drawn in the discussion section of the paper were unsupported by the inconclusive data making the paper unreliable. Clouding the waters further were his press embargo of the paper, the decision to include misleading pictures of the rats, and timing the release of the paper with the release of his book.

2. The FCT’s written text did not provide sufficient justification of the retraction. That could be seen as an ethical lapse. It certainly was unhelpful in it’s lack of clarity. It was likely a legal strategy to minimize risk in litigation.

3. The retraction was possibly politically motivated. The likely motivation was rescuing the journal’s reputation from the harm that Séralini had caused.

4. The assertion that the retraction was motivated by industry pressure is lazy, irresponsible and unsupported by the evidence for reasons that I stated originally and will explain further.

Reading their response to my criticism, it is not clear Sherman and Fugh-Berman understood the points I was trying to make. Perhaps I did not express them with sufficient clarity. I certainly didn’t say that conflicts of interest are a petty annoyance or that the ends justify the means.

What I said was that when we see them, we should proceed with caution. We need to be aware of them, in the case that they are affecting outcomes. BUT. If those outcomes are not anomalous, then charges of conflict of interest have no explanatory power. As I said previously, “You don’t need to follow the money to understand criticism of poor science.”

Before getting back to Sherman and Fugh-Berman’s original editorial, we need to flag two items in their response to my criticism. The first is this:

Mr. Brazeau argues that the conflicts of interests of those in the orchestrated letters to the editor are beside the point because their criticisms are valid.

They are now asserting without qualification that the letters to the editor were orchestrated. They don’t refer to them as likely or possibly ‘orchestrated’. They seem to know that they were orchestrated. If they ‘know’ this, they should share how they ‘know’ it.

Then:

Mr. Brazeau’s claim is a classic “the ends justify the means” argument that is only attractive to those who concur with the result.

I am not making a “the ends justify the means” argument. What I’m saying is that if the ends are not unethical, then they need no justification. Maybe the letters to the editor were orchestrated, if the reasoning and evidence contained in the letters is sound, then what does it matter. A corporate campaign of misinformation and confusing the issue is unethical. A corporate campaign of education and clarity is not. That is why the quality of Séralini’s work is relavent to judging the ethic of the players in this drama.

The argument in Sherman and Fugh-Berman’s original editorial has two parts. The first is that the retraction was unethical because the reasons cited in the retraction are insufficient. They appeal to the norms and guidelines that govern the conduct of academic journals to illustrate this. The second is that the retraction was motivated by industry pressure and bullying. Neither of these holds up to scrutiny, especially the latter.

Let’s look to see if Séralini really skates past the accepted guidelines for retraction.

The clear and confident conclusions that he draws in the discussion section of the paper are unsupported by the data he presents.Unreliable findings. Check.

He allowed the rats tumors to develop far beyond the point that the rats should have been euthanized.Unethical research. Check.

His did not disclose conflicts of interest in the funding of his research and in fact admitted to intentionally obscuring the sources of funding.Failure to disclose conflicts of interest. Check.

So while the stated reasons for the retraction were mealy mouthed and did not fulfill the normal guidelines for retraction, sufficient reasons existed whatever the stated reasons.

A second concern that has been raised is whether this retraction follows the COPE guidelines. The COPE guidelines were consulted when making this decision. According to the COPE guidelines, “Journal editors should consider retracting a publication if… they have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).”(COPE, 2009). The retraction statement could have been clearer, and should have referred to the relevant COPE guidelines. The data are inconclusive, therefore the claim (ie, conclusion) that Roundup Ready maize NK603 and/or the Roundup herbicide have a link to cancer is unreliable. Dr. Séralini deserves the benefit of the doubt that this unreliable conclusion was reached in honest error. The review of the data made it clear that there was no misconduct. However, to be very clear, it is the entire paper, with the claim that there is a definitive link between GMO and cancer that is being retracted. Dr. Séralini has been very vocal that he believes his conclusions are correct. In our analysis, his conclusions cannot be claimed from the data presented in this article.

Sadly, the guidelines are silent about is the unethical conduct by Séralini that brought shame upon the journal that had magnanimously published his work. He designed the study to be a bombshell, this can be seen in the unusual decision to included photos of three tumor riddled rats but to exclude a photo of a rat from the control group. He timed this bombshell to coincide with the release of his book. He embargoed the paper for reporters so that they could not seek informed opinion about it prior to writing about it. The dean of American science writing, Carl Zimmer called this a rancid, corrupt way to report about science. Throughout the book tour, Séralini did not portray the study as inconclusive. None of this reflected well on a journal that obviously should never have published this paper in the first place. Inconclusive studies are published all the time, that’s as it should be. Bad papers slip through peer review. Mistakes happen. The guidelines on retraction are silent on the question of what to do when a scientist refuses to withdraw bad work but instead makes a spectacle of it and turns the journal’s error into an international media event.

” The dean of American science writing, Carl Zimmer called this a rancid, corrupt way to report about science. “

I think it is clear that there were reasonable grounds for retraction, but that FCT should have been clearer about their reasons. As I said, that may be considered an ethical lapse. This is not what Sherman and Fugh-Berman are saying. They are saying that it was unethical for FCT to try to rectify their error when Séralini refused.

That they take that position is understandable and forgivable. What I cannot understand, is writing about ethics, while so casually tossing around charges of corruption and bullying.

Yes, some of the people criticizing the paper had industry ties. That’s a certainly a red flag. But, the observation of a potential conflict of interest sets up a hypothesis, not a conclusion. The lazy observer just uses that observation to make a leap of logic and assume the conflict of interest explains the criticism. The rigorous response is to figure out ways to test that hypothesis. Does it have any explanatory power?

Sherman and Fugh-Berman state, “11 of the authors of letters to the editor slamming Séralini’s study had undisclosed financial relationships with Monsanto.” This sets up the proposition that only relationships with Monsanto can explain the criticism of Séralini’s work. If that was the case, you would expect criticism of Séralini’s work to be confined to people with industry ties. But criticism of Séralini’s work was not confined to people with industry ties. It was near universal. The paper thoroughly failed post-publication peer review.

After carefully reviewing the study, six French national academies (Agriculture, Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, Technology and Veterinarians) issued an extraordinary joint statement condemning it and the journal that published it. The paper was reviewed and refuted by the most prominent independent international science organizations and every food standards agency of note, including French HCB and the National Agency for Food Safety, the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Technical University of Denmark, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety and the European Food Safety Authority

So much for that idea.

What about the case of Richard Goodman an incoming associate editor brought in to clean up the journals peer review? Goodman had previously worked for Monsanto. He was not part of the decision to retract the Séralini paper, but (cue the theremin music) months after he was brought on board Elsevier, FCT’s publisher, announced the retraction. It’s always amazing the power people will attribute to former employers when it suits there purpose. Think back to who you were working for ten years ago. Are they influencing your decisions today? Hmmm? I didn’t think so. It’s all the more striking when that power is imagined to work through people who are not even in the room making the decision.

Jon Entine reports:

Richard Goodman, who runs the AllergenOnline database at the University of Nebraska. Goodman is an internationally respected expert on allergies and the health effects of GM foods—but also a former Monsanto scientist. He was brought in by the FTC earlier this year to clean up the journal’s peer review process. As Robinson acknowledges, “there is no proof that Goodman was responsible for the retraction of Prof Séralini’s study.”

Goodman declined to comment directly, but numerous people have confirmed to me that he was not involved in the evaluation process and was not even aware of what if any action the editor had been contemplating.

Sherman and Fugh-Berman write:

Meanwhile, back at Food and Chemical Toxicology, a new position for an associate editor was filled by Richard E. Goodman, a University of Nebraska professor who previously worked for Monsanto, and who has a longstanding association with the industry-funded International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). Months later, Elsevier, FCT’s publisher, announced the retraction.

THAT … is a smear, pure and simple. A smear made by people who are purporting to write about ethics.

The membership of the editorial board is composed of academic, government, and industrial scientists. Contrary to what has been suggested by some, the appointment of Professor Richard Goodman, University of Nebraska, as an Associate Editor was not influenced by Monsanto or any other party. Members of the editorial board are chosen based on their expertise as scientists. It is the goal of this journal to have a variety of different viewpoints. In this case, as in other cases, I as Editor-in-Chief listened to as wide and diverse a set of expertise as possible. To wit, Professor Goodman, along with all other members of the editorial board was involved in initial discussions of the Séralini paper and the request to view raw data. When the request was made to Dr. Séralini to review the raw data, the journal suggested to Dr. Séralini that all parties involved sign a confidentiality agreement. This confidentiality agreement was designed to protect Dr. Séralini and his data so that it was (A) not viewed by anyone he did not want to view his data and (B) that it would not go beyond the people he agreed would review the raw data. Not initially, but during the process, Dr. Séralini made a direct request that Professor Goodman be excluded, and we at FCT readily and quickly agreed. It is understandable that Dr. Goodman’s involvement, however small, might be cause for concern for some. However, the decision to retract the paper was mine alone, made by me exclusively and not by a vote of the editorial board. Further, when Dr. Séralini asked for Dr. Goodman’s involvement to stop, I agreed, fully and promptly.

The retraction is done and over, the world moves on. Séralini’s work had been thoroughly discredited already. What matters to me is the object lesson in critical thinking. All too often people will point to conflicts of interest, previous employers and potential regulatory capture and jump to conclusions. In doing so, they may feel like they are wised up realists, real critical thinkers. They aren’t. They are lazy and paranoid. They are leaving the job half finished.

I’m often asked, “That study was funded by the industry, don’t you think we should question that?” And I say, “Yes. We should question that. So, let’s think of some questions. Because what you are doing is not questioning it. You are simply dismissing it and using industry funding as a convenient excuse.” That’s not critical thinking. It’s uncritical thinking. You’ve set up a hypothesis and drawn a conclusion, but you’ve skipped the part where you test the hypothesis.

That’s what was particularly galling about Sherman and Fugh-Berman’s editorial. They were lecturing us all about how ‘science works’ while proposing hypotheses and then jumping to conclusions without testing. They were lecturing us all about ethics while blithely smearing others. To crib from Carl Zimmer, that’s a rancid and corrupt way to write about the ethics of science.

]]>http://fafdl.org/gmobb/the-ethics-of-the-seralini-retraction-and-charges-of-conflict-of-interest/feed/1725Glyphosate and Cancer: What does the data say?http://fafdl.org/gmobb/glyphosate-and-cancer-what-does-the-data-say/
http://fafdl.org/gmobb/glyphosate-and-cancer-what-does-the-data-say/#commentsWed, 12 Apr 2017 14:00:19 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=367Guest Author: Andrew Kniss
In March, 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that glyphosate would be added to their list of agents that are “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate wasn’t the only pesticide added to the list, but as Nathanael Johnson noted at Grist, glyphosate tends to be something of a lightning rod due to its association with genetically engineered (Roundup Ready) crops. Let me start by pointing out I’m pretty late to the party writing about this.]]>

A version of this essay previously appeared on Control Freaks. It appears here by permission of the author

In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that glyphosate would be added to their list of agents that are “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate wasn’t the only pesticide added to the list, but as Nathanael Johnson noted at Grist, glyphosate tends to be something of a lightning rod due to its association with genetically engineered (Roundup Ready) crops. Let me start by pointing out I’m pretty late to the party writing about this. The IARC is a well-respected agency within the World Health Organization, so this announcement has been widely reported. And it should surprise nobody that Monsanto is vehemently denying any health concerns, while the usual suspects who oppose GMOs and pesticides are using it to advance their agendas. I think the aforementioned piece by Nathanael Johnson at Grist and a piece by Dan Charles at NPR do a good job of putting this new classification into context. Grist also posted a really cool video that explains what the IARC group 2A classification (“probably carcinogenic to humans”) actually means.

Rather than simply re-state what others have said on the topic, I wanted to actually take a thorough look at the evidence supporting this classification. I work with pesticides (especially glyphosate) on a regular basis, so I take this classification very seriously. If glyphosate is indeed likely to cause cancer, I am in the group of people who is most likely to be affected. As most of the reasonable write-ups have previously noted, IARC group 2A agents are problematic mostly for occupational exposure; that is, people who work with (or around) the chemical on a regular basis over a long period of time. The general public is highly unlikely to see any ill effects from any agent with this classification based on available evidence. I’m disappointed that IARC decided to announce the classification about a year before they plan to release the full monograph that details their reason for the decision. Having their list of references sure would have been useful to determine which data they’re using to come to that conclusion. So I did a literature search for studies that included glyphosate and cancer. A recent review article by Pamela Mink et al. (2012) provided a nice starting point. It should be noted that the review article was funded by Monsanto; however, I didn’t actually rely on the conclusions of the Mink paper, so that potential conflict is mostly irrelevant. I simply used the Mink article as a starting point to find research articles that investigated the link between glyphosate and cancer.Recently, Vox presented a very nice figure that summarised why you shouldn’t put too much faith in any single study about things that cause or cure cancer. I used that as a model to create this figure, which summarises all of the information I could find relating glyphosate exposure to cancer.In the figure, each point represents the relative risk of developing cancer between people who had been exposed to glyphosate and those who hadn’t. To interpret the figure, any points on the left side of the blue line (less than 1) means that, on average, people who were exposed to glyphosate were less likely to get that type of cancer. Points to the right of the blue line mean that people exposed to glyphosate were more likely to get that type of cancer. There are two important things to note about this figure. First, this is an obvious over-simplification of the data. Presenting the data this way excludes the uncertainty of the relative risk estimates. When a study presents these estimates, they usually also present 95% confidence intervals. Those intervals are critical to determining whether we should put much faith in the estimate. Generally speaking, if the confidence interval spans across 1, then we would conclude that the evidence is too weak to suggest any causal link. Even so, if we have similar numbers of points to the left and right of 1, or the points are all clustered very close to 1, we can safely conclude there is little evidence of a link.The second point about the figure above is that there appear to be many points on the right side for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This is important because that is the type of cancer specifically called out in the Lancet Oncology article that the IARC used to officially announce their new classification. The table on the first page of the Lancet paper states that “Evidence in humans” is “Limited”, with the cancer site listed as “non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” The Lancet Oncology paper lists only 16 references, and as far as I could tell, only 3 of those references actually contained information on glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (henceforth referred to as NHL). And those 3 references do seem to suggest a link between glyphosate exposure and NHL.

All three of the studies in this figure are “case-control” studies. This type of study takes a large number of ‘cases’ of the disease of interest, finds a similar group of people without the disease, and then tries to find differences in risk factors between the groups. Any factors that are more prevalent in the ‘case’ group (the group with the disease) are viewed as possible risk factors for the disease. Case-control studies can be very useful, as Vox points out here. In the three case-control studies referenced in the IARC Lancet paper, all of the point estimates are to the right of 1. But the confidence interval from McDuffie et al. (2001) paper includes 1, indicating that the evidence for a link in that study wasn’t very strong. Similarly, DeRoos et al. (2003) used 2 different models, and the confidence interval for one of those models contained 1. As I looked through a variety of case-control studies, multiple models were common. The authors would sometimes evaluate 2 or even 3 different models comparing glyphosate-exposed and non-exposed people. More on this later. I was able to find several more studies (in addition to the 3 that IARC referenced) that investigated links between glyphosate and NHL. All of those studies are summarised in the figure below:

Although many of the confidence intervals contain 1, all of the point estimates are greater than 1. So although there is a lot of variability in the data, the association of glyphosate exposure and NHL does seem to be reasonably consistent across studies. Perhaps this is what the IARC panel saw when they arrived at their conclusion. Similar to DeRoos (2003), both Hardell studies employed more than 1 model. In the studies I read, the difference between models was usually an attempt to adjust for confounding variables. The most common confounding variable in the NHL studies was exposure to other pesticides. A very large percentage of people who are exposed to glyphosate for long periods are also exposed to many other types of pesticides. This is a very important limitation of case-control studies. Most people who use glyphosate a lot (like farmers, commercial pesticide applicators, and weed scientists) tend to be exposed to many compounds that are much rarer among the general public. We certainly tend to use a variety of pesticides, but probably also inhale more dust and fertilizers. We are out in the sun a lot. We probably also get exposed to more hydraulic fluid and wake up earlier than the general population. These things are extremely difficult to control for in a case-control study.

Additionally, in the case-control studies I read, a very small minority of NHL cases were actually exposed to glyphosate. For example, only 97 people (3.8% of the study population) had been exposed to glyphosate in the DeRoos (2003) study. Similarly, only 47 people (2.4% of the study population) had been exposed to glyphosate in the Eriksson (2008) study. These are very small numbers. To look at it another way, only about 3% of the NHL cases in most of the case-control studies had actually been exposed to glyphosate. So even if glyphosate does increase the risk, it certainly is not a major contributor to NHL cases in the general population.

But case-control studies aren’t the only types of studies that have been used to investigate the link between glyphosate and cancer. DeRoos et al. conducted a follow-up to their 2003 study using a different, and arguably better methodology. Cohort studies follow a group of people during some portion (or all, depending on the study) of their lives, and track many risk factors and health outcomes. DeRoos et al. (2005) looked at a group of 54,315 agricultural workers. Once again they used two different models in their analysis, but the results of this study were contrary to what was observed in the case-control studies.

The point estimates were actually less than 1.0, with confidence intervals that contain 1. These results suggest there is no discernible link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma among a population where glyphosate use is the most common. Over 41,000 of the 54,315 study participants had been exposed to glyphosate in this study. And 99.82% of them did not get non-Hodgkin lymphoma during the course of the study.

So what does this all mean? I may change my mind when the IARC’s full monograph is published later, but based on the data I could find, I don’t see any evidence for alarm. And I say that as someone who is exposed to more glyphosate than a vast majority of the population. There is nothing here that I think can tarnish glyphosate’s reputation as a very safe pesticide. But that doesn’t mean that we should throw caution to the wind and douse ourselves in it. And for god’s sake, please stop saying things like “glyphosate is safe enough to drink.” Drinking Roundup doesn’t prove anything, anyway. I could smoke a cigarette and drink a beer in front of a crowd, but that doesn’t make alcohol and cigarettes any less responsible for causing cancers. Glyphosate is still a pesticide, after all. Proper protective equipment and procedures should be followed when any pesticide is used. But when used according to label directions, I think there is no reason to be scared whether you’re a homeowner trying to get rid of weeds in your sidewalk, or a commercial applicator spraying 1,000 acres of Roundup Ready corn.

]]>http://fafdl.org/gmobb/glyphosate-and-cancer-what-does-the-data-say/feed/1367Salt, Vinegar, and Glyphosatehttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/salt-vinegar-and-glyphosate/
http://fafdl.org/gmobb/salt-vinegar-and-glyphosate/#commentsWed, 05 Apr 2017 14:03:47 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=638GUEST AUTHOR: Andrew Kniss
I’ve been asked quite a few times over the last several years about a “homemade” herbicide recipe that is floating around the web. Many of you have probably seen it posted to Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest, or on your favourite home gardening site. One of my favourite descriptions calls it a “magical, natural, weed killing potion.” The recipe is largely the same regardless of the source. There are a pretty wide variety of claims about its safety, effectiveness, and “naturalness” depending on the website. One site even says it is “an alternative to chemical weed killers.” [Spoiler: it contains chemicals.]]]>

I’ve been asked quite a few times over the last several years about a “homemade” herbicide recipe that is floating around the web. Many of you have probably seen it posted to Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest, or on your favourite home gardening site. One of my favourite descriptions calls it a “magical, natural, weed killing potion.” The recipe is largely the same regardless of the source. There are a pretty wide variety of claims about its safety, effectiveness, and “naturalness” depending on the website. One site even says it is “an alternative to chemical weed killers.” [Spoiler: it contains chemicals.]

This site has been taken down since, but the idea that salt, vinegar, and dish soap aren’t chemicals is not uncommon.

The recipe is nearly always a subtle modification of:

½ gallon of vinegar

½ cup of salt

2 tablespoons of dish soap

Vinegar contains acetic acid, a chemical (yes, a chemical) with well-known herbicidal properties; it is commonly used by organic gardeners and farmers as a herbicide. The knowledge that salt (sodium chloride, usually) has herbicidal properties goes waaaayyyy back. Soap (even soap is a chemical) is added to increase the spreading of droplets on the weed leaf surface. Most commercial herbicides also contain soaps for this purpose, although we usually refer to them as “surfactants” in that context. The combination of acetic acid, salt, and soap will certainly kill many annual weeds, especially if applied when the weeds are small.

The question I get most often about this homemade mixture is “how does it compare to commercial herbicides?” In particular, how does it compare to Roundup (the trade name for many glyphosate formulations)? This question is especially relevant since several websites tout the mixture as a safe and inexpensive alternative to glyphosate.

Effectiveness

Comparing the homemade mixture to glyphosate is difficult because the situation will often dictate which herbicide is the better choice. If you are trying to kill small, annual weeds, I would expect the homemade solution to be as effective as glyphosate. The vinegar + salt solution will probably burn the weeds down faster than glyphosate, but glyphosate would likely work slightly better over the long term, especially on large weeds. The glyphosate molecule is systemic, that is, it will travel throughout the plant (even down to the roots) to effectively kill all plant parts. The vinegar + salt solution, on the other hand, works on contact primarily by disrupting the integrity of the cell membranes and desiccating the plant. It will not travel long distances through the plant (say, from one leaf to another). So if you don’t get complete coverage of the plant leaves with the vinegar + salt solution, there is potential for the plant to re-grow from the living tissues. Coverage with glyphosate is less crucial since the herbicide molecule will travel to parts of the plant that were not sprayed.

This difference between systemic and contact herbicides is very important in how to best use each product. Because glyphosate travels through the plant, it can control perennial weeds, such as Canada thistle and quackgrass. The vinegar + salt solution, since it doesn’t move throughout the plant, will not be effective on perennial weeds. It will burn off the top growth of perennials (which may be desirable), but it will not provide long-term control.

The contact nature of the vinegar + salt mixture can be a benefit, though. If you need to kill weeds in close proximity to a desirable plant (say, killing chickweed in a flower bed), then glyphosate can be problematic. Only one or two stray drops from the glyphosate spray bottle onto a flower might be enough to kill the entire plant. A few stray drops of the vinegar + salt solution, on the other hand, will probably cause a little speckling but won’t kill the desirable plants. The exception would be if you continually spray salt in the same area, you can end up with too much salt in the soil, and that will damage nearly all plants. Acetic acid and glyphosate break down rather quickly in the soil, and so won’t cause any long-term soil problems.

So there are certainly some scenarios where the homemade herbicide mixture might be preferable to glyphosate for practical reasons. Comparing effectiveness between the two herbicides is difficult; they both have a potential fit depending on the situation. But what about the “inexpensive” and “safe” claims? I did a little homework to see how the homemade herbicide mixture compares to glyphosate with respect to cost and toxicity.

Cost

For costs, I went to Walmart and checked prices for vinegar, salt, and soap.

It would cost approximately $3.31 to mix up one gallon of homemade herbicide, using prices from Walmart. This is using name-brand products available at most grocery stores; one could lower the price further by buying the Walmart branded products instead of name-brands. If I bought Walmart’s Great Value brands, the price would be reduced to $2.70/gallon.

My local Walmart doesn’t sell a Roundup-branded product that contains only glyphosate; there were always other herbicides included ranging from triclopyr (for woody species and vine control) to diquat (for quick burndown) or imazapic (for long-term residual control). But there were several products that contained only glyphosate. A half-gallon of Eliminator Weed & Grass Killer Concentrate was available for $27.97. At first glance, this seems much more expensive than the homemade mixture; however, to mix up 1 gallon of spray solution, you only need to add 1.5 fluid ounces of the concentrated product. At that rate, the cost of the glyphosate solution is only $0.66/gallon. The label states that for “Tough Weed Control” you can mix up to 2.5 fluid ounces per gallon, raising the cost to $1.09/gallon. Even then, glyphosate is actually less expensive than the homemade mixture on a per-gallon, ready-to-spray basis.

Toxicity

For the toxicity comparison, I only looked up the mammalian toxicity values for glyphosate, acetic acid, and salt. Rat acute oral toxicity values and rabbit acute dermal toxicity values for all three chemicals are summarised in the following table. The toxicity values are presented in mg of material per kg of body weight of the test organism. The LD50 is the dose of the chemical that would kill 50% of the test population; in this case rats dosed orally or rabbits dosed on the skin. Low LD50 numbers mean higher toxicity.

In both toxicity measures, acetic acid is more toxic than glyphosate. Salt is more toxic to rats compared to glyphosate when exposed orally. The dermal toxicity numbers are a little more difficult to interpret since for both glyphosate and salt, the values are listed as greater than a value. This typically means that the experimenters did not kill enough of the test rabbits at the highest doses used in the studies; so we know that glyphosate is safe at least up to 2,000 mg/kg and salt is safe at least up to 10,000 mg/kg. But we can determine from this data that acetic acid is more toxic than both glyphosate or salt. Pound per pound, glyphosate actually appears to be less acutely toxic to the mammalian test organisms compared to acetic acid or salt.

But this is only half the story with respect to toxicity. To estimate the actual risk of these products, we need to know not only the toxicity but also the use rate; the dose makes the poison. Even highly toxic substances can be used safely if the dose is sufficiently low, and seemingly safe chemicals can be problematic if the dose is too high.

To figure out the actual risk, we need to calculate the amount of the toxic substances being applied. Most distilled white vinegar is 5% acetic acid (50 grain). At this concentration, one gallon of the homemade mixture would contain 6.4 fluid ounces of acetic acid (the active ingredient). One gallon of acetic acid weighs 8.74 lbs; so 6.4 fluid ounces would weigh 0.437 lbs; so there is 0.44 lbs of acetic acid per gallon of homemade mixture. To convert this to similar units as the LD50 values, 0.44 lbs equals 198,220 mg.

Eliminate Grass & Weed Killer contains 3.7 lbs of glyphosate acid per gallon; or 0.0289 lbs glyphosate acid per fluid ounce. At the higher labelled rate of 2.5 fluid ounces of product per gallon, there would be 0.07 lbs of glyphosate acid per gallon of mixed product. Similarly converting this to the same units as the LD50 values, 0.07 lbs equals 31,751.5 mg. So it appears that glyphosate, the less toxic chemical, is being applied at a rate 6-times lower compared to acetic acid.

Let’s do one more calculation to put these toxicity numbers into perspective. Male rats can weigh up to 500 g, or 0.5 kg. One gallon of the homemade mixture contains 198,200 mg of acetic acid, or approximately enough to kill 59 rats, if administered orally. One gallon of mixed glyphosate solution contains 31,752 mg glyphosate, or enough to kill 6 rats. The acetic acid in the homemade mixture is nearly 10 times more lethal than the glyphosate in the Eliminate mixture. And this doesn’t include the salt.

How could this be, you ask? Everything you’ve read on the internet says glyphosate is causing ailments from autism to obesity. How could glyphosate be less toxic than vinegar? Truth is, it is easy to make a chemical (any chemical) sound pretty nasty, even if you use verifiable, factual information.
For example, sodium chloride, one of the ingredients in the homemade herbicide solution, is mutagenic for mammalian somatic cells and bacteria. Another ingredient, acetic acid, is highly corrosive, can aggravate respiratory disorders, and even cause permanent vision loss. Does this sound like something you want to be spraying in the same yard where your children and pets play? Should you be dousing your yard with a potent chemical cocktail that causes mutations in humans and causes blindness? And now we learn that this chemical cocktail is nearly 10 times more lethal to mammals than glyphosate, one of the most potent weed killers on the planet! If you’re less scrupulous about your sources, you can even find links between acetic acid and a multitude of disorders, including eczema, psoriasis, shingles, and herpes. You read that right; THIS HOMEMADE HERBICIDE MIXTURE MIGHT GIVE YOU HERPES!

Maybe you’re not worried about the safety aspect; you simply don’t want to purchase Roundup because you dislike Monsanto. Well, don’t forget that vinegar is often made from corn, and most corn in the US has the Roundup Ready trait (which was developed by Monsanto). So the vinegar you are using to spray your weeds is probably made from corn that was sprayed with glyphosate: the very herbicide you were trying to avoid.

What does it all mean?

All joking aside, the important thing to keep in mind is that both the homemade vinegar + salt mixture and Roundup are pretty darn safe when used properly, they’re both relatively inexpensive, and both can provide effective weed control in the appropriate situation. Now, all this discussion has made me hungry for some Roundup Ready sweet corn, with just a little salt, and a salad with a nice vinaigrette dressing.

]]>http://fafdl.org/gmobb/salt-vinegar-and-glyphosate/feed/1163817 of 17 – Can Glyphosate Research Be Trusted?http://fafdl.org/gmobb/17-of-17-can-glyphosate-research-be-trusted/
Tue, 28 Mar 2017 14:00:24 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=615GUEST AUTHOR: Iida Ruishalme
In my series 17 Questions about Glyphosate, last but not least comes a post about the integrity of research, how funding may influence research results, and what corporate involvement with scientists may entail. And if scientists mostly are not influenced by industry, why are there so many conflicting study results?]]>

In my series 17 Questions about Glyphosate, last but not least comes a post about the integrity of research, how funding may influence research results, and what corporate involvement with scientists may entail. And if scientists mostly are not influenced by industry, why are there so many conflicting study results?

What about conflicts of interest and industry funding?

This question often comes up whether the one posing the question knows about a definite connection to industry or not. Sometimes the concern goes as far as to include the ‘medical establishment’ as a pressuring actor that hinders scientists from publishing differing results. What many don’t realise, is that new and different results are actually the best thing a scientist could hope for. As long as you have quality evidence supporting your findings, publishing new results that go against an earlier understanding is one of the most exciting things that could happen to a scientist.

When it comes to connections to industry, there is a worrisome state of affairs around the concept ‘Conflicts of interest’, or COI. In discussions online people often look first at who has funded a study. That in itself is fine, and it’s good information to have in the background. But that is not what usually happens. Instead, if they find that the study authors have an (openly declared) COI of some kind, they announce that to be the end of discussion – the study’s findings can be dismissed directly.

This break-down of 197 randomly selected safety studies on GE foods demonstrates the lack of funding bias: all the studies follow the same trend no matter funding source. The GENERA database has a collection of over a thousand studies and their funding information. See also About Those Industry Funded GMO Studies by Marc Brazeau.

This is intellectual dishonesty at its finest: using the existence of a COI as a magic weapon that frees one from the need to consider evidence, especially if one does not like the direction of its conclusions. In some contexts, merely implying that a scientist has a connection with industry – any connection, at any point of their career, however flimsy – is taken as near-certain evidence of fraud. Take the case of Kevin Folta: an independent genetics researcher whose non-profit outreach program, where he volunteered his time, received modest amounts of travel money from Monsanto for speaking engagements. When this came to light, he was widely trashed in social media, personally harassed, and his office was broken into – the whole campaign was an attempt to smear him as if he was ‘bought and paid for’.

I was once laughed at by a commenter who implied how ridiculous it was even to consider my words on vaccines – because I had once worked for a pharmaceutical company (but not in vaccine research). Take a moment to think about this. Think of some of your previous employers – or even current ones – what is your relationship to them? Would you wish to distort the truth in order to twist important facts so that they appear in some former employers favour? What lengths would a company have to go to, even a current one, to get you to compromise your integrity by committing fraud, and in so doing endangering your credibility and career?

Being bought and paid for is far less likely, than the option that people on any side of a debate – activists, skeptics, scientists – simply believe they are doing the right thing and think they are seeing things from the correct perspective. But if they all equally sincerely believe they are doing the right thing, how can we know who is actually in the right? The best tool for determining which view indeed lies closest to the truth remains the objective assessment of data. We are easily blinded by our biases, especially when our beliefs are an essential part of our identity. Whoever disagrees with you is not the enemy – the important fight is against our own cognitive failings. And this IS the science fight: to weed out bias, and get us closer to understanding what truly goes on in the world.

It is bizarre for people to declare a person ‘dirty’ on the basis of them building bridges between the academia and the industry, or for agreeing to test an important part of a company’s research at an independent location, or even for something as simple as having once earned a living in one’s field. But it does make for a convenient excuse for not having to listen to anyone with the relevant know-how, and for not getting into the complicated workings of the scientific process.

In science, credibility is everything

It’s important to keep in mind that having a COI does not mean that a study is biased. Alison Bernstein, aka Mommy, PhD, has written a great piece about this, titled Credibility is Our Currency, over at Biofortified:

While conflicts of interest may lead to research misconduct, they are not evidence of misconduct nor are conflicts of interest necessarily misconduct on their own. The presence of a COI may demand closer scrutiny of the research to determine if misconduct or bias affected the interpretation of the results. However, a COI itself is not research misconduct, nor does the existence of a COI automatically mean that research misconduct occurred. This is not to minimize the importance of the disclosure of COIs. It is this very transparency that allows us to identify problems, limit COIs and scrutinize research that may be biased. In science, credibility is our currency.

No sweetening the deal here

It is very grave and risky business for a researcher to commit misconduct, one that could cost them their entire career. Not only that, to become a researcher is a painstaking and not very well paying process that is hardly attractive if your primary motivation is monetary gain, and unless you actually are interested in finding out how the world actually works. Turning one’s back on all of that may not happen so easily. For perspective, there are a couple of striking examples of results that even go against the clear COI of their authors: Honey-industry funds a comparison study of honey, and the researchers find honey is not better than high fructose corn syrup:

Honey has an aura of purity and naturalness. Fresh air, birdsong, forests and meadows. High-fructose corn sweetener? Not so much. So you might think that honey is better for you. But a study published this month compared the health effects of honey and the processed sweetener and found no significant differences.

The honey industry funded scientists studying honey. And the scientists… swiftly surrender their morals and go against the essence of being a scientists in order to produce a paper that shows how great honey is? If you’ve listened to much of the anti-glyphosate and anti-GMO rhetoric, that surely is the logical conclusion. Funnily enough, in this case the scientists found nothing to make the honey industry happy and went forward to report it anyway. Fancy that! Could it be that these scientists were in it for the science?

But biased studies do get published

So COI alone is definitely not proof of manipulated data or even a study conclusion drawn in the funding parties’ favour. But that doesn’t mean that research misconduct motivated by a conflict of interest could not happen or would not have happened at all. Sadly, sometimes even when a scientist is directly and fully funded by industry advocacy groups, and a Freedom Of Information email request uncovers a clearly communicated expectation that the scientist should find and publish evidence to support a preconceived conclusion, the COIs are swept under the rug by the media.

This, in fact, is what happened with the only case of misconduct/undeclared COI which has come to light on a study of glyphosate. This particular interest which conflicted with objectivity of the research was the interest to find evidence that would reflect negatively on glyphosate and genetically modified crops. The case concerns economist Charles Benbrook and his undisclosed ties to the organic industry, which ended with him losing his position at Washington State University. It was reported on FarmOnline Emails expose anti-GM science for hire, and over at Genetic Literacy Project here and here:

University of Melbourne senior lecturer in food biotechnology and microbiology, agriculture and food systems David Tribe said the FOI email exchange showed that there was a PR plan to produce a predetermined outcome on the efficacy of GMs — not a scientific one.

“This exchange shows that Kailis is prepared to pay for research that has a preordained outcome and is confirmation of bias,” he said.

The hard currency of evidence

But even before the undeclared and inappropriate conflicts of interest came to light, the most important analysis of Benbrook’s claims had already been made. Secondary to any potential agenda or bias he might have had, scientists went straight to the data presented in his studies, they critically evaluated his methods, and pointed out how the conclusions he drew ignored some important factors entirely. They focused at first hand not on what his monetary incentives may have been, but on the value of his work from the perspective of the only hard currency in science: that of evidence.

Evidence is what we should use to evaluate a claim, whether we like the claim or not. Resorting to smear-tactics only obscures the really important discussion underneath. If we want to understand how the world works, critical thinking and careful evaluation of data is what counts.

Some people look at cases of misconduct (cases do get revealed, and papers retracted), at COIs, at single studies which never get confirmed, or point in starkly different directions, and say that science is broken. But this is just the messy process of science in action. Could the process be improved? Certainly, it should be, and improvements do happen.

Meanwhile, scientific process is still, has been for a long time, and will continue to be the best bet we have at getting at true knowledge. This is why we should turn to science with our questions. No matter how much science improves, however, it will always be true that a single study does not a fact make. Science is about degrees of uncertainty – only through entire bodies of research, which together point in a certain logical direction, can we come to any kind of less uncertain conclusion about how the world actually seems to work. A great look at the faulty sides of science and analysis of its self-correcting nature can be found on the journalist blog fivethirtyeight. They write:

…headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.
If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result.

In fact, industry influence has rarely if never managed to sway the state of research – one biased study quickly gets left behind as confirmations fail. This is why the bigger industry bias in fact can be found in marketing and political lobbying, as succinctly presented here by the farmer and science communicator Farm Babe. An academics review paper on Organic Marketing Report shows that wealth of funding is being poured into organisations which oppose pesticides, spend their fund by purchasing adds and billboard campaigns, and targeting parents and health-conscious consumers by scare-campaigns.

The intricate network of activist ‘grass-root’ organisations who are against pesticides and biotechnology and their funding ties to the organic industry from the Organic Market Report.

But haven’t industries influenced the state of research before?

Even in the much publicised recent case of the 70s sugar industry scandal, it’s important to remember the following, very well outlined in this piece: the nutritional sciences field was full of incomplete and uncertain results, and there were many independent scientists looking at both, the health effects of fats as well as sugars, and some simply thought the evidence on one or other was more alarming. One of the scientists who already subscribed to the idea that sugar was the lesser evil, later received undisclosed funding from the sugar industry – a clear breach of research ethics. These ideas were already being battled by several independent scientists, however, and the funding simply aligned with a team who already thought there was more support for the dangers of fats (there are, but that doesn’t mean sugar isn’t also harmful) and the field of human nutrition is an especially hard one, seeing as it is hard to conduct controlled long-time experiments.

…a single narrative review was unlikely to sway academic thought for 50 years. The evidence that the nutrition evidence-base was compromised by the review is weak.
[…]
Down-weighting or ignoring data from people or sources we dislike without empirical reasons to mistrust the data is to willingly position ourselves in a world with less information in the thin hope that the remaining information will somehow be better—but with no such guarantees.

Science has come a long way from those times both in our knowledge about nutrition and the metabolism, as well as the regular scrutiny of funding sources – this kind of undisclosed sponsorship would never have gone unnoticed today. In any case, scientists and research are much more difficult to influence than public image in the minds of consumers (as the tobacco industry, for instance, learned a long time ago, well outlined in this piece by the Credible Hulk), and the returns of investment are much greater in an avenue where teams of independent scientists aren’t continually poised to go on picking apart any flaws or inconsistencies in the narratives offered.

Thank you for reading my series on glyphosate. A few concluding words…

New innovative research is always welcome, especially for a substance as widely used as glyphosate. We should always strive to honestly evaluate the evidence before forming our views on a topic. As the numerous examples of this series of 17 Questions About Glyphosate demonstrate, the greatest glyphosate-resistance around may indeed be one of a more psychological kind: it has become a fix idea in many minds that glyphosate must be behind a whole host of ills in our world. Trying desperately to fit the evidence into the idea, rather than allowing our ideas to be shaped by the evidence, is what has resulted in this process of claim-whack-a-mole. I have no doubt that next month some new variation of glyphosate-sensationalist news will give wings to yet another far-fetched or misleading claim. The game might never come to a real conclusion, for it may be that for many, the only acceptable kind of world is one where glyphosate can only be a bad guy.

]]>61514-16 of 17 – Glyphosate and Field Ecosystemshttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/14-16-of-17-glyphosate-and-field-ecosystems/
http://fafdl.org/gmobb/14-16-of-17-glyphosate-and-field-ecosystems/#commentsThu, 23 Mar 2017 14:00:45 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=596GUEST AUTHOR: Iida Ruishalme
In my series 17 Questions about Glyphosate, question 14. deals with glyphosate-resistant weeds: whether they pose a problem, and why campaigners against glyphosate should be the last ones to worry about this particular issue. Question 15. looks at the soil ecosystems: what do we know about the effects of glyphosate on soil micro-organisms? Does it affect nutrient balance and mineral uptake? Plus comments on what one troubled study found out about earthworms. Question 16. delves into whether there is a relationship between glyphosate and the situation of Monarch butterflies or bees.]]>

In my series 17 Questions about Glyphosate, question 14. deals with glyphosate-resistant weeds: whether they pose a problem, and why campaigners against glyphosate should be the last ones to worry about this particular issue. Question 15. looks at the soil ecosystems: what do we know about the effects of glyphosate on soil micro-organisms? Does it affect nutrient balance and mineral uptake? Plus comments on what one troubled study found out about earthworms. Question 16. delves into whether there is a relationship between glyphosate and the situation of Monarch butterflies or bees.

14. What about resistance and superweeds?

Firstly, by talking about superweeds we are getting farther away from understanding a problem. Let’s instead talk about something well defined, without the embellishments and vague impressions added by the term superweed.

A better question would be: is there a problem with glyphosate-resistant weeds? Certainly, weeds developing a widespread resistance against glyphosate would nullify all of its earlier outlined environmental benefits, and farmers would have to revert to tilling as a means of weed control, as well as older, more toxic herbicides. That would be a big blow to the farmers and the environment. Conversely, it would also make the campaigns for a glyphosate-ban redundant, as glyphosate would no longer be used, or its use would be greatly reduced. So… from the perspective of said campaigns against glyphosate, problem solved?

This is the extent of the resistance problem: if resistance becomes all too problematic, farmers stop using glyphosate. Conversely, most people who worry about glyphosate would not deem cessation of its use an issue at all. Isn’t it rather more problematic (from their perspective) that glyphosate use is not creating enough glyphosate-resistant weeds in order to undermine its usefulness for farmers?

Since the discovery of glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth, arguably the most damaging of all the so-called superweeds, cotton yield in the affected states continues to increase.

To be clear, though, I don’t want anyone to get the impression that glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth hasn’t had a major impact. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that farmers in the South have had to adapt to this particular problem by using other herbicides, re-introducing tillage, or using cover crops. These additional weed control practices cost money, and growers with glyphosate-resistant weeds may very well have seen a reduction in their net economic return. There are surely many examples of individual cotton fields where yield was significantly reduced by this weed. But I think it is important to note that these herbicide-resistant weeds have not had the devastating impact on crop yields, at least not on a macro-scale, that is often implied by the sensational coverage of this topic.

15. Does glyphosate interfere with soil organisms or nutrient availability?

There are a couple of claims on glyphosate’s effects in the soil, basically along the lines of: glyphosate interferes with plant mineral uptake in soil, or causes other problems with soil dynamics. The short answer to that is, that there is no evidence of unwanted effects in soil characteristics with appropriate use of glyphosate.

One of the older reviews on the topic, from 1992, has characterised glyphosate in relation to the environment and other organisms as follows:

There is no residual soil activity, it does not leach into non-target areas, and it is non-volatile. It is practically nontoxic to mammals, birds and fish, showing no bioaccumulation in the food chain; it is biodegraded into natural products. When used correctly, glyphosate poses no threat to the environment and its inhabitants.

A 2012 review article published in the Agricultural and Food Chemistry Journal found no difference in plant diseases or mineral nutrient availability with or without glyphosate or RoundUp Ready (RR) crops. That’s not to say that when it’s sprayed, glyphosate could probably have an inhibiting effect on soil bacteria before it gets broken down. At least a temporary inhibition is what happens with sufficient millimolar concentrations in the lab (see here and here), although the dynamics might be different in soil: one study found that glyphosate antibacterial effect seems to be neutralised by the presence of humic acid, which is the major organic component of the soil. This could be part of the reason why an earlier study, from 2001, also found that glyphosate did not affect microbial communities in the soil, and noted that artificial media assays were of limited relevance to what actually happened in the farmed soils. You can also read more about the studies on glyphosate and soil at Biofortified: Does glyphosate restrcit crop mineral uptake?

Jonathan Eisen, the earlier cited microbiome researcher who presented on this topic before the US National Academy of Science, also made the following comment in the discussion following one his blog posts:

I am actually interested in how glyphosate might affect microbiomes. I think it is incredibly unlikely that ingestion of glyphosate in food has any significant effect on microbiomes in animals. But I do think it is possible that glyphosate affects soil and plant microbiomes and that in turn could affect what microbes come into animals (via eating the plants). So I think this is interesting and worth pursuing. This notion is not about glyphosate good or bad. Just about testing the possibility that it indirectly affects animals microbiomes (and if so, this could be a beneficial effect).

This is an interesting area of research, and it’s always good to keep an open mind and a critical eye out on new evidence accumulating on the topic. A recent seven year field-study, published in 2016, found no effect from glyphosate with RR crops or non-RR crops with regards to macronutrients or exoenzymes (which are signs of microbial activity) in the soil. In fact, no-till and conservation tillage, which glyphosate enables, has a documented positive effect on the soil physiochemical and microbiological properties – seeing how traditional tilling method is actually a very soil-disruptive type of weed management.

Most laboratory studies worry about glyphosate’s potential inhibory effect on bacteria, observed when glyphosate concentrations are high enough, but there is also a field study published in 2013, which found that glyphosate present in 50 millimolar concentrations increased bacterial activity and heterotrophic bacterial population:

The results show that in a soil with a long historical use of glyphosate (soil 1), the heterotrophic bacterial population was significantly (p<0.05) increased. Also, by increase in the bacterial population, the herbicide existence as the possible nutrient source is enhanced.

They conclude that said increased microbial activity may be beneficial or detrimental toward plant growth, soil microbial ecology, and soil quality. Perhaps glyphosate use could enrich microbial communities both thanks to no-till and directly through its presence in low concentrations. Perhaps in some situations the concentrations would get too high – like in areas where long cold winter conditions slow down natural breakdown processes – and there could be a noticeable negative effect on the microbial populations. But to determine that, we need good, tangible data of field conditions. The potential relationships at work here are far from simple, and proper conclusions can never be drawn from hypotheses alone.

The gist of this question is quite practical: if glyphosate did cause big issues for beneficial soil microbes or nutrient problems for plants, that would soon lead to problems for the farmers. Note that glyphosate has been used for 40 years, and to the best of my knowledge, no such shift has happened. Impacts such as reduced yields, poorer soils, more bacterial diseases, or abnormal development would be something that farmers would be very quick to get to the bottom of.

About earthworms

Earthworm | Flickr CC License | Schizoform

One of the latest studies on a different vein, but raising alarm about glyphosate in the soil, was one where the researchers claim to show its effect on earthworms. They also make a somewhat contrary finding about glyphosate use increasing soil nutrient levels. Andrew Kniss, again, makes an illuminating analysis of the study in his piece Dead Plants Are Probably Bad For Earthworms.

The short of it is: the amount of glyphosate was an order of magnitude higher than real life scenarios; glyphosate was used in combination with an organic herbicide and the effects of the two can’t be separated; basic understanding of nutrient balance was missing; and vital controls were overlooked. Earthworms did not do as well in soils where all plants had died. The study authors had not thought that this factor would need its appropriate control – a plot where all plants were hand weeded, for instance, or the soil would have been tilled to kill the plants, or another method of plant removal was used. When such crucial controls are lacking, the information content of a study unfortunately drops significantly. Andrew Kniss concludes:

All of the effects on earthworms and nutrients observed in this study could simply be due to killing the plants in the pots. It is perfectly plausible the exact same effects would be observed if the plants were clipped or pulled out of the pots.

In either way, even if this study would not have such blatantly obvious flaws, we could not draw too many conclusions based on its results alone. Science is really not about one study one way or another. To account for bias, misconduct, poor design, random chance, etc, a study needs to go through the scrutiny of the scientific community as well as stand the test of time – it must be confirmed by independent groups of scientists, through several robustly designed studies presenting multiple lines of evidence. Shoddy studies do get published – but they get buried under the larger context of pieces which demonstrate more solid methodology and which do get confirmed by yet other independent research groups. Science works by accumulation. To date, it has not accumulated a convincing body of evidence supporting the existence of big problems for the soil ecosystems from the glyphosate used in farming.

16. Does glyphosate harm Monarch butterflies or bees?

Glyphosate is a herbicide, in other words, it is toxic to plants. Its target enzyme is not found in animals, so it is generally not very harmful for insects – and as confirmed by a recent study, even direct sprays are not lethal to bees.

Glyphosate could have an indirect effect on Monarchs, however, because it has enabled great advances in weed management, and as a result, while other farming impacts such as use of resources and nutrient leeching are reduced, the number of weeds such as milkweed, which the Monarchs thrives on, have decreased. In the keynote address which Ted Nordhaus from the Breakthrough Institute gave at the first annual Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy Symposium, he makes an eloquent point on this issue, should it be so that efficient weed control were behind Monarch decline:

There is a correlation between glyphosate use and butterfly decline. But it’s not that glyphosate is killing the butterfly. It is an herbicide that targets plants, not insects. Rather, glyphosate is killing milkweed, a weed in which monarchs lay their eggs. While the decline of monarch butterflies is an unintended consequence of glyphosate use, the elimination of milkweed is not. It is one of the weeds that the herbicide is supposed to get rid of.

The trade-off here is straightforward and zero sum. You can either have more milkweed in cornfields or higher yields, but you can’t have both. If you choose more milkweed, then you are choosing lower yields, and, all else being equal, that means putting more land under cultivation to achieve the same level of agricultural output. With that comes attendant losses of habitat and biodiversity elsewhere.

Ultimately, the only way to have more monarch butterflies without reducing agricultural output or saving monarchs at the expense of other species is to create more monarch habitat outside of cornfields. This is an effort that a lot of people more concerned about monarch preservation as opposed to scoring ideological points about the food system have begun to focus on.

“But if the problem is that the monarchs are dying during the migration,” Davis says, “I’m not sure just trying to produce more at the start of the [fall] migration is the answer.” Other steps, such as protecting migratory pathways, may also be needed.

The overwintering habitat loss indeed seems to be the bigger factor in Monarch butterflies decline, as the conclusion of a recent study confirms:

…there are statistically significant negative temporal trends at the overwintering grounds in Mexico, suggesting that monarch success during the fall migration and re-establishment strongly contributes to the butterfly decline. Lack of milkweed, the only host plant for monarch butterfly caterpillars, is unlikely to be driving the monarch’s population decline. Conservation efforts therefore require additional focus on the later phases in the monarch’s annual migratory cycle. We hypothesize that lack of nectar sources, habitat fragmentation, continued degradation at the overwintering sites, or other threats to successful fall migration are critical limiting factors for declining monarchs.

If we truly are concerned about the fates of endangered species, we should be meticulous in evaluating the evidence for what really are the biggest factors influencing their place in the ecosystem. When it comes to farming, it is important that we use pesticides in a way to make sure we target the harmful insects and reduce the harm on others. The situation of many insects is complex – like in the case of bees, who, while essentially not affected by glyphosate, can be harmed by pesticides, but also do have several larger problems than the widely publicised neonicotinoid pesticides. More often than not, it is farming itself that brings about this difficult balancing act of providing for us while reducing the impacts on the environment. It’s the fact that we are so many, that what we do and the space we take up does greatly affect the environment. It is not an easy problem to solve, but efficient farming methods that leave as much nature outside of cultivated areas as possible are an important part of that puzzle.

]]>http://fafdl.org/gmobb/14-16-of-17-glyphosate-and-field-ecosystems/feed/459613 of 17 – Glyphosate and The Environmenthttp://fafdl.org/gmobb/13-of-17-glyphosate-and-the-environment/
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:00:55 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=567GUEST AUTHOR: Iida Ruishalme
In my series 17 Questions about Glyphosate, question 13. looks at glyphosate and its impacts on farming methods and the environment.
Even if glyphosate poses no risk for the consumers, perhaps its problems lie in the effects on the environment? Let’s look at some of the details.]]>

Even if glyphosate poses no risk for the consumers, perhaps its problems lie in the effects on the environment? Let’s look at some of the details.

13. Does glyphosate use enable bad farming practices?

Glyphosate helps preserve soils with no-till

Glyphosate is often used in combination with genetically engineered crops, particularly ones which are able to synthesise their aromatic amino-acids even in the presence of glyphosate. They are called RoundUp Ready (RR) crops, and are a big part of the existing Herbicide Tolerant Crops (HTCs). Many people believe this combination of RoundUp and GMO crops to be detrimental to the environment, but there tends to be little evidence to back up their assumption.

The USDA has actually documented the benefits to the environment from the combined use of herbicides and HTCs such as RR crops. The key benefit comes from how glyphosate enables farmers to omit the tilling step – move to no-till. Tilling leads to erosion and nutrient run-off, among other things, and avoiding it has many benefits. At USDA they write:

These trends suggest that HT crop adoption facilitates the use of conservation tillage practices. In addition, a review of several econometric studies points to a two-way causal relationship between the adoption of HT crops and conservation tillage. Thus, in addition to its direct effects on herbicide usage, adoption of herbicide-tolerant crops indirectly benefits the environment by encouraging the use of conservation tillage.

Should farmers be forced to stop using glyphosate, and revert to more tilling as their method of weed control, the prospects of increases in fuel use, reduced sequestration of soil organic matter, increased nutrient leeching, and increase in emissions would be significant.

In other words, glyphosate use is part of the emission reductions attributable to biotechnology crops, which I have discussed earlier in my piece GMOs and the Environment.

This effect would be pronounced even in Europe, where the benefits of glyphosate use are not as large, as it is mostly not used in combination with biotech crops (which brings further benefits). To give an idea about that effect, I translated excerpts of a Finnish news piece on the topic below:

The [potential glyphosate] ban directly affects the cultivation technique. Instead of no-till the fields will have to be tilled. After that, the fields often need to be turned once more and stones must be collected,” the Copa-Cogeca Secretary-General Pekka Pesonen said.

“Without glyphosate, fuel consumption per-hectare will increase 20 to 30 liters. There will also be more work for the farmer, 15 to 18 hours more per hectare,” the German sugar beet farmer Bernhard Conzen said.

Tilling is one of the most detrimental methods for the environment. The less we rely on tilling, the better for the goal of sustainable farming practices. For more on that, you can read an excellent piece on what sustainable practices mean on Biofortified. The weed ecology professor Andrew Kniss has also written on the subject. In his excellent piece about trade-offs in agriculture, he writes:

If we truly want to encourage crop diversity, then glyphosate use can be a powerful tool in allowing those diverse crop rotations while still managing weeds.

And what about the environmental costs of reducing glyphosate use? One study estimates that using glyphosate herbicide in conjunction with glyphosate-resistant corn and soybean have prevented 41 billion lbs of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere between 1996 to 2013. Adoption of glyphosate-resistant soybean was recently estimated to have increased soil conservation tillage practices by 10, and notill adoption by 20%.These practices help reduce soil erosion, and the many environmental problems associated with soil erosion. Is a reduction in glyphosate worth an increase in erosion and worsening climate change? I acknowledge this trade-off is far too simplistic, as there are ways to mitigate these impacts. But those options have costs also.

It is not enough to pose the question: does glyphosate present a risk? We also have to take in consideration the question: what are the risks if we do not allow farmers to use glyphosate?

Part of Grant’s intense interest in [GMO] beets definitely stemmed from his own farm’s experiences with the “traditional regimen” of herbicide products and application timing and methods. “It was a nightmare,” he recalls of those pre-Roundup days. “We had failures all the time — fields that would become unharvestable because of our failure to control weeds. We had an army of people applying herbicides around the clock or just at night. We did micro-rates, we did maxi-rates, you name it.”

“We had one sprayer for every 500 acres, so eight sprayers running around,” Grant relates. “They would work whenever they could. It might be all night long; it might be 24 hours straight because they had a window.

“It was a horrible life. Just last spring (of 2011), as the Roundup litigation was progressing through the courts and it was unclear whether we’d be able to plant Roundup Ready seed, my sugarbeet manager flat-out told me, ‘If we have to be conventional again, I’m quitting. I can’t do it.’

]]>5677-12 of 17 – Glyphosate in Wind, Rain; Down the Drain?http://fafdl.org/gmobb/7-12-of-17-glyphosate-in-wind-rain-down-the-drain/
Fri, 17 Mar 2017 14:00:39 +0000http://fafdl.org/gmobb/?p=530Guest Author: Iida Ruishalme
Series 17 Questions about Glyphosate! In questions 7-11 I go through the evidence for whether glyphosate can be detected, and if so then in which quantities, in each of the following: air and rainwater, urine, breastmilk, wine, and wheat. I have also added extra sections on glyphosate in honey, vaccines, and tampons.
Question 12. delves into the common verbal images of farmers ‘drenching’ their fields in pesticides, and how much farmers actually use.]]>

Series 17 Questions about Glyphosate questions 7.-11. I go through the evidence for whether glyphosate can be detected, and if so then in which quantities, in each of the following: air and rainwater, urine, breastmilk, wine, and wheat. I have also added extra sections on glyphosate in honey, vaccines, and tampons.

Question 12. delves into the common verbal images of farmers ‘drenching’ their fields in pesticides, and how much farmers actually use.

7. Is there glyphosate in the air and rainwater?

Despite the case for there being less need to worry about glyphosate than most other pesticides, there are still many arguments around which rely rather on making scary claims about the abundance of glyphosate in our environment. They make the silent implication that this level of detection must be significant and should make us worried about health effects. But often the claims of glyphosate in something or other are misleading, and sometimes downright false.

One case of hasty reporting about glyphosate being detected in air and rain water has been outlined well in Biofortified, RoundUp in 75 % of air? What the report actually says. It serves to show how people will be quick to grab on to a factoid and make it sound scarier than it is.

The report actually showed that glyphosate use had reduced the overall traces of pesticides found, and replaced many of the older more toxic pesticide traces found earlier (see more about environmental effects in section 13) – and this directly on fields where the pesticides were used. In any case, the study deals with mind-bogglingly fine-tuned detection with mass spectrometry (as an example, satellites and spacecraft use mass spectrometers for the identification of the small numbers of particles intercepted in space). The pesticides were present in concentrations millions of times below any biological relevance – the ability to even detect them is an ode to the wonders of modern measurement techniques.

Now let’s look at a couple of other more relevant locations (food, bodily fluids) where claims of detection of glyphosate has been used to create alarm.

A critical review and comparison of data obtained in a total of seven studies from Europe and the US was performed. The conclusion can be drawn that no health concern was revealed because the resulting exposure estimates were by magnitudes lower than the ADI [acceptable daily intake] or the AOEL [acceptable operator exposure level].

And we know from the examples earlier that even the acceptable daily intake is set at an incredibly low level – hundred times lower than the level which has showed no observable adverse effects in the most sensitive lab animals tested. The levels of glyphosate in urine, in other words, are ridiculously small.

Anyone trying to scare others about the levels of glyphosate in their urine is making irresponsible claims and using a ethically questionable emotional tactics. If someone is making claims of harmful levels of glyphosate in urine, they are doing so without reliable scientific evidence.

9. What about breastmilk?

The claim of risky levels of glyphosate in breastmilk (along with many other out-there ideas about glyphosate – see for instance her latest claim and its flaws laid out here: ‘there is glyphosate in vaccines‘) originates from the activist organisation Moms Across the America (MAA). Journalist Kavin Senapathy has tried to engage the MAA leader Zen Honeycutt in civil discussion several times without much success. She has also written about Zen’s campaigns on Forbes. In one of her articles Kavin Senapathy writes:

MAA promotes the evidence-scarce “glyphosate as bogeyman” tale as gospel. Though the herbicide is less acutely toxic than caffeine, table salt, and some pesticides used in organic farming, Honeycutt insists that residues affect our gut microbiomes, which Moms Across America has linked to myriad ailments including autism, allergies, infertility, eczema, fibromyalgia, Crohn’s Disease, childhood tantrums and pneumonia.

If there was evidence for a role of glyphosate in any of the above mentioned ills, it would be easy to see why glyphosate in breast milk would scare you. But the evidence for that, or any realistic connection between glyphosate and tantrums, autism, or any other ailment from that list, is sorely lacking. The ‘finding’ itself – of glyphosate residue in breastmilk – comes from an incorrectly processed assay of ten samples with a method that is known to generate false positives, gathered and reported by none but Zen Honeycutt herself, and made public by her posting about it on her MAA website. Meanwhile, real scientific study by a lactation physiologist confirms the opposite. WSU reserachers find breastmilk is glyphosate free:

“The Moms Across America study flat out got it wrong,” said McGuire, who is an executive committee member for the International Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation and a national spokesperson for the American Society for Nutrition. “Our study provides strong evidence that glyphosate is not in human milk. The MAA findings are unverified, not consistent with published safety data and are based off an assay designed to test for glyphosate in water, not breast milk.”

For a great discussion about breast milk research, as well as the ELISA assay and its limitations, you can listen to the podcast where geneticist Kevin Folta interviews the lactation researcher McGuire and the analytical chemist Thomas Colquhoun: Glyphosate in breast milk and wine?

There has also been a german study of 114 mothers, which did not find any glyphosate in breast milk, and a study outlining the flaws and implausibility of the MAA ‘finding’ based on earlier animal studies. Yet another study confirmed the lack of glyphosate in any of the following:

The claim from MAA is an example of a particularly unethical practice: fabricating an issue for breastfeeding parents to worry about, in a time when the world is so safe, that worry and anxiety themselves are real and larger concerns (see the Harvard overview on Anxiety and Physical Illness) than many of the things we actually worry about.

10. Should we worry about glyphosate in wine?

You may have heard a warning about glyphosate residue in wine. It also originates from not qualified use of ELISA assays by Zen Honeycutt. This warning has been coupled with an out-of-context alarm about glyphosate as a carcinogen. Sometimes the lack of perspective is so tangible it boggles the mind. Please read Kevin Folta’s apt summary on the issue below:

Again, for a great discussion about the unqualified wine ‘finding’, as well as ELISA assay and its limitations, you can listen to the podcast where geneticist Kevin Folta interviews the analytical chemist Thomas Colquhoun: Glyphosate in breast milk and wine?

More on glyphosate omnipresence

Considering that new scares about glyphosate in x drops in, I might as well add some here as they come.

Honey

Latest headlines: glyphosate in honey found mentioned in a FOIA request on FDA. As there isn’t much more information on the data, let’s just assume these three samples tested were accurate. They apparently found 22, 41, and 170 ppb levels of glyphosate residue, which is 0.022-0.170 mg/kg honey. If you notice, even the rumour about glyphosate in wine above claimed 1 ppm (1000 ppb). So, is there need to worry? To get to the most restrictive daily allowed limit (the European one at 0.5 mg/kg body weight per day, note this is the still safe limit with a hundred-fold safety margin) a person would have to ingest about 3 kg honey per kg body weight in one day.

To even attempt a temporary inhibitive effect from glyphosate on our gut bacteria (see more in Does Glyphosate Harm Gut Bacteria?), you’d have to aim higher – around 3000 kg, 3 tons, of honey in one go. Though we may have become pickled in honey long before, and the sugar concentration would have effectively killed most bacteria, not to mention suffocated the poor human drowned in that pool of honey, large enough to submerge even a big person.

Vaccines

The claim ‘there is glyphosate in vaccines’ originates from another not-qualified-use of ELISA assays by the activist organisation Moms Across the America (MAA) and Zen Honeycutt (who is not only against modern farming methods but also vaccines). This assay has not been validated for anything apart from water, and even in water is used as a first screening step because of its chance of giving false positives. That’s why these results of 0.1-3 ppb traces can’t be used as any indication that there would actually be glyphosate in vaccines. Parts per billion, meanwhile are so far below biological relevance that they could not have an effect on our health even if they were there. More about this from Vaxopedia.
For a longer discussion about these claims you can also listen to the podcast Weed killer in vaccines? by the geneticist Kevin Folta, who writes:

They use a kit you can buy on the internet, but fail to use it in the way it is designed. Instead of using it on water, they use it on complex mixtures that yield false positives that are interpreted as legitimate signals.

Tampons

An Argentine scientist claims they detected glyphosate in female hygiene products at the level of 4 ppm. There is no study, there is a rumoured conference presentation and a video in Spanish from 2015. Nothing has been published. Even if the claims were true, which we can’t tell, 4 ppm is below the highest allowed residue level of 5 ppm, deemed of no risk to the consumers by all scientific literature reviews and a whole slew of scientific organisations like the WHO, FAO, EPA, EFSA… More on this claim from Dr. Jen Gunter at: No, your tampon still isn’t a GMO-impregnated toxin-filled cancer stick.

11. Is wheat toxic because of glyphosate?

Seneff is also the person behind much of the hype about wheat being toxic, for more on that, please see question 3. over at Glyphosate and Health Effects A-Z. Specifically, what comes to celiac disease, the National Academies of Science report in 2015 found no difference between incidences of celiac disease in USA and UK, whereas the countries’ glyphosate usage trends are markedly different:

Celiac-disease detection began increasing in the United States before the introduction of GE crops and the associated increased use of glyphosate; the disease appears to have increased similarly in the United Kingdom, where GE foods are not typically consumed and glyphosate use did not increase.

There are a couple of other people claiming that wheat is toxic, too, but most of those choose to put their bets on wheat itself, not glyphosate. See for instance an analysis of Dr William Davis, author of the Wheat Belly, who blames wheat for causing some 60 widely varied illnesses. The most common denominator for many of them seem simply to be obesity. Toxic wheat -claims have been widely circulated by several mommy-bloggers in many forms.

There isn’t much to add to this sorry tale, other than that it lacks evidence, that pesticide residues in food are carefully monitored and stay extremely low, and again, epidemiological studies have not found any connection between glyphosate and the numerous purported illnesses. For more on the details of glyphosate use in wheat, you can read what agricultural scientists and farmers have to say about it over at WeedControlFreaks, or from the perspective of Nurse Loves Farmer.

When it comes to diets, vilifying any one food ingredient, or even food group, such as carbohydrates, has little basis in scientific evidence. Moderation is the key. Eat a varied diet, lot of vegetables and fruit, don’t eat too much calorie-dense foods – wheat, or any other food, eaten in excess will bring any number of negative health effects, at the very latest as a consequence of obesity.

12. Are crops drenched in glyphosate?

Some very good sources to turn to on questions about pesticides, farming, and weed control, are agricultural scientist Steve Savage and the weed ecology Professor Andrew Kniss. Steve Savage writes for Forbes, and also publishes most of his journalistic pieces on his blog Applied Mythology. On top of his work on weed science, Andrew Kniss also blogs over at WeedControlFreaks to make agricultural science more accessible to the public. Steve Savage has made some apt comparisons of what we understand as drenching, dousing, or slathering, and how that relates to the amounts of pesticide applied on crops – the amounts are generally hundreds to thousands of times smaller than the words would imply. Most of any pesticide spray consists of water.

To put things in another kind of perspective, Andrew Kniss has written about a comparison of glyphosate and common home-made herbicide mixture of acetic acid, salt, and soap. In his piece Salt, Vinegar, and Glyphosate, he writes:

At the higher labeled rate of 2.5 fluid ounces of product per gallon, there would be 0.07 lbs of glyphosate acid per gallon of mixed product. Similarly converting this to the same units as the LD50 values, 0.07 lbs equals 31,751.5 mg. So it appears that glyphosate, the less toxic chemical, is being applied at a rate 6-times lower compared to acetic acid.

Andrew Kniss also comments on some of the more out-there health-claims made about glyphosate, by pointing out how easy it is to find scary sounding information about common household substances by lifting concepts out of context and misleadingly blowing up their relevance for the consumer:

Truth is, it is easy to make a chemical (any chemical) sound pretty nasty, even if you use verifiable, factual information. For example, sodium chloride, one of the ingredients in the homemade herbicide solution, is mutagenic for mammalian somatic cells and bacteria. Another ingredient, acetic acid, is highly corrosive, can aggravate respiratory disorders, and even cause permanent vision loss. Does this sound like something you want to be spraying in the same yard where your children and pets play? Should you be dousing your yard with a potent chemical cocktail that causes mutations in humans and causes blindness? And now we learn that this chemical cocktail is nearly 10 times more lethal to mammals than glyphosate, one of the most potent weed killers on the planet! If you’re less scrupulous about your sources, you can even find links between acetic acid and a multitude of disorders, including eczema, psoriasis, shingles, and herpes. You read that right; THIS HOMEMADE HERBICIDE MIXTURE MIGHT GIVE YOU HERPES!